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THE INNER LIFE 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



THE INNER LIFE 



BY 

RUFUS M. JONES, A.M., Litt.D. 

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HAVERFORD COLLEGE 

AUTHOR OF " STUDIES IN MYSTICAL RELIGION " 
" SPIRITUAL REFORMERS," ETC. 



Wefa ff orft 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1916 

All rights reserved 






Copyright, 1916, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1916. 









VI 



J. S. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



OCT 19 1916 

©CI.A445214 



\s> 



*\ 



INTRODUCTION 

There is no inner life that is not also 
an outer life. To withdraw from the 
stress and strain of practical action and 
from the complication of problems into 
the quiet call of the inner life in order to 
build its domain undisturbed is the sure 
way to lose the inner life. The finest of 
all the mystical writers of the fourteenth 
century — the author of Theologia Ger- 
manica — knew this as fully as we of this 
psychologically trained generation know 
it. He intensely desired a rich inner life, 
but he saw that to be beautiful within he 
must live a radiant and effective life in 
the world of men and events. "I would 
fain be," he says, "to the eternal God 
what a man's hand is to a man" — i.e. he 
seeks, with all the eagerness of his glow- 



vi INTRODUCTION 

ing nature, to be an efficient instrument 
of God in the world. In the practice of 
the presence of God, the presence itself 
becomes more sure and indubitable. Re- 
ligion does not consist of inward thrills 
and private enjoyment of God; it does 
not terminate in beatific vision. It is 
rather the joyous business of carrying the 
Life of God into the lives of men — of 
being to the eternal God what a man's 
hand is to a man. 

There is no one exclusive "way" either 
to the supreme realities or to the loftiest 
experiences of life. The "way" which we 
individuals select and proclaim as the 
only highway of the soul back to its true 
home turns out to be a revelation of our 
own private selves fully as much as it is a 
revelation of a via sacra to the one goal of 
all human striving. Life is a very rich 
and complex affair and it forever floods 
over and inundates any feature which we 
pick out as essential or as pivotal to its 
consummation. God so completely over- 
arches all that is and He is so genuinely 



INTRODUCTION vii 

the fulfillment of all which appears in- 
complete and potential that we cannot 
conceivably insist that there shall be only 
one way of approach from the multiplic- 
ity of the life which we know to the 
infinite Being whom we seek. 

Most persons are strangely prone to use 
the " principle of parsimony." They 
appear to have a kind of fascination 
for the dilemma of either-or alternatives. 
"Faith" or " works" is one of these 
great historic alternatives. But this 
cleavage is too artificial for full-rounded 
reality. Each of these " halves" cries 
for its other, and there cannot be any 
great salvation until we rise from the 
poverty of either half to the richness 
of the united whole which includes both 
"ways." 

So, too, we have had the alternative 
of "outer" or "inner" way forced upon 
us. We are told that the only efficacious 
way is the way of the cross, treated as 
an outer historical transaction ; and we 
have, again, been told that there is no 



viii INTRODUCTION 

way except the inner way of direct ex- 
perience and inner revelation. There are 
those who say, with one of George Chap- 
man's characters : 



<tjy 



I'll build all inward — not a light shall ope 
The common out-way. 
I'll therefore live in dark ; and all my light 
Like ancient temples, let in at my top." 

Over against the mystic who glories in 
the infinite depths of his own soul, the 
evangelical, with excessive humility, allows 
not even a spark of native grandeur to 
the soul and denies that the inner way 
leads to anything but will-o'-the-wisps. 
This is a very inept and unnecessary 
halving of what should be a whole. It 
spoils religious life, somewhat as the 
execution of Solomon's proposal would 
have spoiled for both mothers the living 
child that was to be divided. Twenty- 
five hundred years ago Heraclitus of 
Ephesus declared that there is "a way 
up and a way down and both are one." 
So, too, there is an outer way and an 



INTRODUCTION ix 

inner way and both are one. It takes 
both diverse aspects to express the rich 
and complete reality, which we mar and 
mangle when we dichotomize it and 
glorify our amputated half. There is a 
fine saying of a medieval mystic: "He 
who can see the inward in the outward 
is more spiritual than he who can only 
see the inward in the inward." 

This little book on the "Inner Life" 
does not assume to deal with the whole of 
the religious life. It recognizes that the 
outer in the long run is just as essential 
as the inner. This one inner aspect is 
selected for emphasis, without any inten- 
tion of slighting the importance of the 
other side of the shining shield. Men 
to-day are so overwhelmingly occupied 
with objective tasks ; they are so busy 
with the field of outer action, that it is 
a peculiarly opportune time to speak of 
the interior world where the issues of 
life are settled and the tissues of destiny 
are woven. There will certainly be some 
readers who will be glad to turn from 



x INTRODUCTION 

accounts of trenches lost or won to spend 
a little time with the less noisy but no 
less mysterious battle line inside the soul, 
and from problems of foreign diplomacy 
to the drama of the inner life. 



CONTENTS 



Introduction 



Chapter I. The Inner Way 

Sec. i. The Momentous Choice . 
Sec. 2. Making a Life . 
Sec. 3. The Spirit of the Beatitudes 
Sec. 4. The Way of Contagion . 
Sec. 5. The Second Mile . 

Chapter II. The Kingdom within the Soul 
Sec. 1. Bags that Wax not Old . 
Sec. 2. Otherism .... 

Sec. 3. Scavengers and the Kingdom . 
Sec. 4. " The Beyond is Within " 
Sec. 5. The Attitude toward the Unseen 

Chapter III. Some Prophets of the Inner 
Way . 
Sec. 1 . The Psalmist's Way 
Sec. 2. The New and Living Way 
Sec. 3. An Apostle of the Inner Way 
Sec. 4. The Ephesian Gospel 



PAGE 
V 

I 
I 

9 
14 
23 
30 

39 
39 
46 
50 
56 
61 

70 
70 

77 
82 
90 



Xll 



CONTENTS 



Chapter IV. The Way of Experience 

Sec. i. Waiting on God 

Sec. 2. In the Spirit . 

Sec. 3. The Power of Prayer 

Sec. 4. The Mystery of Goodness 

Sec. 5. "As One having Authority" 

Sec. 6. Seeing Him Who is Invisible 



Chapter V. A 



Fundamental 
Outlook . 



Spiritual 



Chapter VI. What does Religious Experi- 
ence Tell Us about 
God 



PAGE 

97 
97 
105 
in 
116 
123 
*33 

138 



164 



THE INNER LIFE 



THE INNER LIFE 

CHAPTER I 

THE INNER WAY 
I 

THE MOMENTOUS CHOICE 

Every scrap of writing that sheds any 
light on the life of Jesus, and every in- 
cident that gives the least detail about 
His movements or His teaching are precious 
to us. One can hardly conceive the joy 
and enthusiasm that would burst forth in 
all lands, if new fragments of papyrus or 
of parchment could be unearthed that 
would add in any measure to our knowl- 
edge of the way this Galilean life was 
lived "beneath the Syrian blue." But it 
may now probably be taken for granted 
that the material will never be forth- 
coming — and it surely is not now in 
hand — for an adequate biography of 



2 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

Him. The lives of Jesus that have been 
written in modern times have a certain 
value, as suggestive revelations of what 
the writers thought He ought to have 
been or ought to have done, but biogra- 
phies, in the true sense of the word, they 
are not. The Evangelists performed for 
us an inestimable service, but they did 
not furnish us the sort of data necessary 
for a detailed biography, expressed in 
clock-time language. 

Our "sources" are much more adequate 
when we turn our attention from external 
events to the inner way which His life 
reveals, though they still allow for free 
play of imagination and for much fluidity 
of subjective interpretation. It is possible, 
however, I believe, to look through the 
genuine words that are preserved and to 
see, with clairvoyant insight, the inner 
kingdom of the soul in that Person whose 
interior life was the richest of all those 
who have walked our earth. There are 
curious little playthings to be bought in 
Rome. If one looks through a pin-hole 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 3 

peep somewhere in one of these tiny 
toys, one sees to his surprise the whole 
mighty structure of St. Peter's Cathedral, 
standing out as large as it looks in re- 
ality. Perhaps we can find some pin- 
hole peeps in the gospels that in a similar 
way will let us see the marvelous inner 
world, the extraordinary spiritual life, of 
this Person whose outer biography so 
baffles us. 

Our first single glimpse of His interior 
life must be got without the help of any 
actual word of His. It is given to us in 
the gospel accounts of His discovery of 
His mission. How long the consciousness 
of mission had been gestating we cannot 
tell. What books He read, if any, are 
never named. What ripening influence 
the days of toil in the carpenter shop may 
have had, is unnoted. What dawned 
upon Him as He meditated in silence is 
not reported. What formative ideas may 
have come from the little groups of "the 
quiet ones in the land" can only be 
guessed at. We are merely told that He 



4 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

increased in wisdom as He advanced in 
stature, which is the only conceivable 
way that personality can be attained. 
Suddenly the moment of clear insight 
came and He saw what He was in the 
world for. 

It was usual for the great prophets of 
His people to discover their mission in 
some such moment of clarified inward 
sight. Isaiah saw the Lord with His 
train filling the temple, felt his lips cleansed, 
and heard the call "who will go?" Eze- 
kiel saw the indescribable living creature 
with the hands of a man under the wings 
of the Spirit and heard himself called to 
his feet for his commission. So here, 
there was a sudden invading consciousness 
from beyond. The world with its solid 
hills appears only the fragment, which it 
is, and the World of wider Reality floods 
in and reveals itself. The sky seems rent 
apart, the Spirit, as though once more 
brooding over a world in the making, 
covers Him from above, and gives inward 
birth to a conviction of uniqueness of Life 



4^ 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 5 

and Uniqueness of mission. He feels Him- 
self in union with His Father. 1 

This experience of the invading Life, 
awakening a consciousness of unique per- 
sonal mission, brought with it, as an un- 
avoidable sequence, the stress and strain 
of a very real temptation. The inner 
world of self-consciousness has strange 
watershed " divides" that shape the cur- 
rents of the life as the mountain ridges of 
the outer world do the rivers. No new 
nativity, no fresh awakening, can come to 
a soul without forcing the momentous 
issue of its further meaning, or without 
raising the urgent question, how shall the 
new insight, the fresh light, the increased 
power be wrought into life ? The deepest 
issues turn, not upon the choice of " things," 
but upon the choice of the kind of self that 
is to be, and the most decisive dramas are 
those that are enacted in the inner world 
before the footlights of our private theater. 
The temptation is described by the Evan- 
gelists in such conventional language and 

1 Mark I. 10-11. 



6 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

in such popular and pictorial imagery that 
its immense inner reality is often missed by 
the reader. This oriental, pictorial way 
of presenting the drama of the soul catches 
the western mind in the toils of literalism. 
The picture is taken for the reality. What 
we have here in the temptation, when we 
go into the heart of the matter, is the 
momentous choice of the kind of Person 
that is to emerge. It is the immemorial 
battle between the higher and the lower 
self within. It was the line of least resist- 
ance to accept popular expectation, to go 
forth to realize the dream of the age. A 
person conscious of divine anointing, fired 
with passionate loyalty to the nation's 
hopes, gifted with extraordinary power of 
moving men to new issues would feel at 
once that he had only to put himself forth 
as the expected Messiah in order to carry 
the enthusiastic people with him. Let 
him but come with the spectacular powers 
of the Messiah that was eagerly looked for, 
the power to turn stones to bread, to leap 
from the pinnacle of the temple without 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 7 

injury, to break the Roman yoke and 
make Jerusalem once again the city of 
God's chosen people — and success was 
sure to follow. God's ancient covenant 
was an absolute pledge to the faithful 
that He would in His own time make 
bare His arm and deliver His people. 
As soon as the anointed one appeared 
all the forces of the unseen world would 
be at his command and his triumph would 
be assured. 

The appeal of a career like that is no 
fictitious " temptation." It is of a piece 
with what besets us all. It is out of the 
very stuff of nature. At some such cross- 
road we have all stood — with the issue 
of our inner destiny in unstable equi- 
librium. 

Over against it, another "way" is set, 
another kind of life is dimly outlined, 
another type of anointed one is seen to 
be possible, another kingdom, totally dif- 
ferent from the one of popular expecta- 
tion, is descried. This kingdom of His 
spiritual vision cannot come by miracle 



8 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

or by power; it can come only through 
complete adjustment of will to the will 
of the Father-God. This anointed one of 
His higher aspiration will be no temporal 
ruler, no political king, no spectacular 
wonder-worker. He will rule only by the 
conquering power of love and goodness. 
He will venture everything on sheer faith 
in the Father's love and on the appeal 
of uncalculating goodness of heart and 
will. This new kind of life that draws 
Him from the line of least resistance is a 
life of utter simplicity, which discounts 
what the world calls " goods," which 
draws upon an unseen environment for 
its resources and which expands inwardly, 
rather than outwardly, after the manner 
of the green bay tree. The new "way" 
that opens to His sight, and that beckons 
Him from all other ways of glory, is a 
way of suffering and sacrifice, a way of 
the cross. It offers itself not because 
self-giving is a better way than an easy, 
happy path, but because it is the only 
way by which love in a world- like ours 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 9 

can reach its goal ; it is the only way by 
which the kingdom of God can be formed 
in the lives of men like us. 

He came forth from those momentous 
days of inner struggle with the issue 
settled, and with the first step taken in 
the way of the Kingdom. 

II 

MAKING A LIFE 

Our present-day age has a kind of 
passion for the study of developing pro- 
cesses. We do not feel quite at home 
with any subject until we can work our 
way back to its origin or origins and then 
follow it in its unfoldings, explaining the 
higher and more complex stages in terms 
of the lower and more simple ones. 

That method, however, cannot be suc- 
cessfully used to unlock the secret of the 
gospels. We do not find beginnings here ; 
we cannot follow genetic processes ; we 
are unable to discriminate higher and 
lower stages of insight. We must launch 
out at the very start in mid-sea. What- 



IO THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

ever words of Christ one begins with 
indicate that He has already arrived at 
an absolute insight — I mean, that He 
has found a way of living that is no longer 
relatively good, but intrinsically and ab- 
solutely good. 

It is an inveterate habit with men like 
us to estimate everything in terms of 
relative results. We are pragmatists by 
the very push of our immemorial instincts. 
Our first question, consciously or un- 
consciously, is apt to be, what effects will 
come, if I act so, or so ? Will this course 
work well ? Will it further some issue or 
some interest ? And this deep-lying prag- 
matic tendency — this aim at results — 
appears woven into the very fiber even 
of much of the religion of the world. 

Sometimes the results sought are near, 
sometimes they are remote ; sometimes 
they are sought for this world, sometimes 
they are sought for the next world ; some- 
times the pragmatic aim at results is 
crudely and coarsely selfish, sometimes it 
is refined, or altogether veiled, but religion 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY n 

has no doubt often enough been an im- 
pressive kind of double-entry bookkeep- 
ing, the piling up of credits or of merits 
which some day will bring the sure result 
that is sought. 

Just that entire pragmatic attitude 
Christ has left forever behind. His inner 
way, His interior insight, passes on to a 
new level of life, to a totally different 
type of religious aspiration and to another 
method of valuation. For Him the be- 
yond is always within. The only good 
thing is a life that is intrinsically good ; 
the only blessedness worth talking about 
is a kind of blessedness which attaches 
by a law of inner necessity to the char- 
acter of the life itself. It makes no 
difference what world one may eventually 
be in — if only it is still a world of spirit- 
ual issues — goodness, holiness, likeness 
to God, will still constitute blessedness as 
they do in this world. 

When once this insight is reached, it 
affects all the pursuits and all the valua- 
tions of the soul. All "other things" at 



12 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

once become secondary, and " entering into 
life," " seeking life," "finding life," be- 
comes the primary thing. " Making a 
life" overtops in importance even " mak- 
ing a living" — the life is more than 
meat, more than raiment, more than 
gaining the whole world. It is better to 
enter into life halt and maimed — with 
right hand cut off and eye plucked out 
— than bend all one's energies to preserve 
the body whole and yet to miss life. The 
way to life is strait, the entering gate is 
narrow. One cannot enter without facing 
the stern necessity of focusing the vision 
on the central purpose, without getting 
"a single eye," without letting go many 
things for the sake of one thing. 

Sacrifice, surrender, negation, are in- 
herently involved in any great onward- 
marching life. They go with any choice 
that can be made of a rich and intense life. 
It is impossible to find without losing, 
to get without giving, to live without 
/ /dying. But sacrifice, surrender, negation, 
are never for their own sake ; they are 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 13 

never ends in themselves. They are in- 
volved in life itself. 

One great spiritual law comes to light 
and becomes operative, as soon as the 
interior insight is won, as soon as the 
inner way is found : The law that the 
soul can have what it wants. This law of 
the interior life, of the inner way, Christ 
affirms again and again in varying phrase. 
The inner attitude, the settled trend of 
desire, the persistent swing of the will, are 
the very things that make life. The 
person who cherishes hate in his soul 
forms a disposition of hatred and must 
live in the atmosphere which that spirit 
forms. The person who longs for deeds 
that are wrong, and allows desire to play 
with free scope is inwardly as though he 
did the deed. He is what he wants to be. 
And so, too, on the other hand, the rightly 
fashioned will is its own reward and has 
its own peculiar blessedness. The person 
who hungers and thirsts for goodness will 
get what he wants. He who seeks, with 
undivided aspiration, will always find. 



14 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

He who knocks with persistent desire for 
the gates of life to open will see them swing 
apart for him to go through to his goal. 
He who asks, with the ground swell of 
his whole inner being, for the things 
which minister to life and feed its deepest 
roots, will get what he asks for. The 
very pity of the Pharisee's way of life 
is that he has his reward — he gets what 
he is seeking. The glory of the other 
way is the glory of the imperfect — the 
glory of living toward the flying goal of 
likeness to the Father in heaven. 

Ill 

THE SPIRIT OF THE BEATITUDES 

In putting the emphasis for the moment 
on the inner way of religion, we must be 
very careful not to encourage the heresy 
of treating religion as a withdrawal from 
the world, or as a retreat from the press 
and strain of the practical issues and 
problems of the social order. That is the 
road to spiritual disaster, not to spiritual 
power. Christ gives no encouragement 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 15 

to the view that the spiritual ideal — 
the Kingdom of God — can ever be 
achieved apart from the conquest of the 
whole of life or without the victory that 
overcomes the world. Religion can no 
more be cut apart from the intellectual 
currents, or from the moral undertakings, 
or from the social tasks of an age, than any 
other form of life can be isolated from its 
native environment. To desert this world, 
which presses close around us, for the sake 
of some remote world of our dreams, is to 
neglect our one chance to get a real re- 
ligion. 

But at the same time the only possible 
way to realize a kingdom of God in this 
world, or in any other world, is to begin 
by getting an inner spirit, the spirit of 
the Kingdom, formed within the lives of 
the few or many who are to be the "seed" 
of it. The "Beatitudes" furnish one of 
these extraordinary pin-hole peeps, of which 
I spoke in a former section, through which 
this whole inner world can be seen. Here, 
in a few lines, loaded with insight, the 



16 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

seed-spirit of the Kingdom comes full into 
sight. We are given no new code, no 
new set of rules, no legal system at all. 
It is the proclamation of a new spirit, 
a new way of living, a new type of per- 
son. To have a world of persons of this 
type, to have this spirit prevail, would 
mean the actual presence of the Kingdom 
of God, because this spirit would produce 
not only a new inner world, but a new 
outer world as well. 

The first thing to note about the blessed- 
ness proclaimed in the beatitudes is that 
it is not a prize held out or promised as a 
final reward for a certain kind of con- 
duct; it attaches by the inherent nature 
of things to a type of life, as light attaches 
to a luminous body, as motion attaches 
to a spinning top, as gravitation attaches 
to every particle of matter. To be this 
type of person is to be living the happy, 
blessed life, whatever the outward con- 
ditions may be. And the next thing to 
note is that this type of life carries in 
itself a principle of advance. One reason 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 17 

why it is a blessed type of life is that it 
cannot be arrested, it cannot be static. 
The beatitude lies not in attainment, 
not in the arrival at a goal, but in the 
way, in the spirit, in the search, in the 
march. 

I suspect that the nature of "the happy 
life" of the beatitudes can be adequately 
grasped only when it is seen in contrast 
to that of the Pharisee who is obviously 
in the background as a foil to bring out 
the portrait of the new type. The pity 
of the Pharisee's aim was that it could 
be reached — he gets his reward. He has 
a definite limit in view — the keeping of a 
fixed law. Beyond this there are no 
worlds to conquer. Once the near finite 
goal is touched there is nothing to pursue. 
The immediate effect of this achievement 
is conceit and self-satisfaction. The trail 
of calculation and barter lies over all his 
righteousness. There is in his mind an 
equation between goodness and prosperity, 
between righteousness and success: "If 
thou hast made the most High thy habita- 



1 8 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

tion there shall no evil befall thee ; neither 
shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling." 
The person who has loss or trouble or 
suffering must have been an overt or a 
secret sinner, as the question about the 
blind man indicates. 

The goodness portrayed in the " beati- 
tudes" is different from this by the width 
of the sky. Christ does not call the 
righteous person the happy man. He 
does not pronounce the attainment of 
righteousness blessed, because a "right- 
eousness" that gets attained is always 
external and conventional ; it is a kind 
that has definable, quantitative limits — 
"how many times must I forgive my 
brother?" "Who is my neighbor?" 
The beatitude attaches rather to hunger 
and thirst for goodness. The aspiration, 
and not the attainment, is singled out for 
blessing. In the popular estimate, happi- 
ness consists in getting desires satisfied. 
For Christ the real concern is to get new 
and greater desires — desires for infinite 
things. The reach must always exceed 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 19 

the grasp. The heart must forever be 
throbbing for an attainment that lies 
beyond any present consummation. It is 
the " glory of going on/' the joy of dis- 
covering unwon territory beyond the mar- 
gin of each spiritual conquest. 

Poverty of spirit — another beatitude- 
trait — is bound up with hunger for good- 
ness as the convex side of a curve is bound 
up with the concave side. They are 
different aspects of the same attitude. 
The poor in spirit are by no means poor- 
spirited. They are persons who see so 
much to be, so much to do, such limitless 
reaches to life and goodness that they 
are profoundly conscious of their insuffi- 
ciency and incompleteness. Self-satisfac- 
tion and pride of spiritual achievement 
are washed clean out of their nature. 
They are open-hearted, open-windowed 
to all truth, possessed of an abiding 
disposition to receive, impressed with a 
sense of inner need and of childlike de- 
pendence. Just that attitude is its own 
sure reward. By an unescapable spiritual 



20 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

gravitation the best things in the universe 
belong to open-hearted, open-windowed 
souls. Again, in the beatitude on the 
mourner, He reverses the Pharisaic and 
popular judgment. Losses and crosses, 
pains and burdens, heartaches and bereave- 
ments, empty chairs and darkened win- 
dows, are the antipodes of our desires and 
last of all things to be expected in the list 
of beatitudes. They were then, and still 
often are, counted as visitations of divine 
disapproval. Christ rejects the superficial 
way of measuring the success of a life by 
the smoothness of its road or by its free- 
dom from trial, and He will not allow the 
false view to stand ; namely, that success 
is the reward of piety, and trouble the 
return for lack of righteousness. There 
is no way to depth of life, to richness of 
spirit, by shun-pikes that go around hard 
experiences. The very discovery of the 
nearness of God, of the sustaining power 
of His love, of the sufficiency of His grace, 
has come to men in all ages through pain, 
and suffering and loss. We always go for 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 21 

comfort to those who have passed through 
deeps of life and we may well trust Christ 
when He tells us that it is not the lotus- 
eater but the sufferer who is in the way 
of blessing and is forming the spirit of 
the Kingdom. 

Meekness and mercy and peace-making 
are high among the qualities that charac- 
terize the inner spirit of the kingdom. 
Patience, endurance, steadfastness, con- 
fidence in the eternal nature of things, 
determination to win by the slow method 
that is right rather than by the quick and 
strenuous method that is wrong are other 
ways of naming meekness. Mercy is 
tenderness of heart, ability to put oneself 
in another's place, confidence in the power 
of love and gentleness, the practice of 
forgiveness and the joyous bestowal of 
sympathy. Peace-making is the divine 
business of drawing men together into 
unity of spirit and purpose, teaching 
them to live the love-way, and forming 
in the very warp and woof of human 
society the spirit of altruism and loyalty 



22 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

to the higher interests of the group. 
These traits belong to the inmost nature 
of God and of course those who have them 
are blessed, and it is equally clear that 
the Kingdom is theirs. There is further- 
more, in this happy way of life, a condition 
of heart to which the vision of God in- 
herently attaches. He is no longer argued 
about and speculated upon. He is seen 
and felt. He becomes as sure as the sky 
above us or our own pulse beat within us. 
We spoil our vision with selfishness, we 
cloud it with prejudices, we blur it with 
impure aims. We cast our own shadow 
across our field of view and make a dark 
eclipse. It is not better spectacles we 
need. It is a pure, clean, sincere, loving, 
forgiving, passionately devoted heart. 
God who is love can be seen, can be found, 
only by a heart that intensely loves and 
that hates everything that hinders love. 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 23 

IV 

THE WAY OF CONTAGION 

We have seen that religion cannot be 
sundered from the intellectual currents, 
or from the moral undertakings, or from 
the social tasks of the world. It cannot 
be merely inward. It can preserve its 
inward power only as it lives in actual 
correspondence with its whole environ- 
ment and becomes also outward. But the 
primary thing for Christ, we saw, was the 
attainment of an inner spirit, the seed- 
spirit of the Kingdom, the spirit of the 
beatitudes — the attainment of a type 
of life to which blessedness inherently 
attaches. 

The question at once arises, how shall 
this inner spirit be spread and propagated ? 
How is religion of the inner type to grow 
and expand ? There are two character- 
istic ways of propagating religious ideas, 
of carrying spiritual discoveries into the 
life of the world. One way is the way of 
organization; the other way is the way of 



24 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

contagion. The way of organization, which 
is as old as human history, is too familiar 
to need any description. Our age has 
almost unlimited faith in it. If we wish 
to carry a live idea into action, we or- 
ganize. We select officials. We make 
" motions." We pass resolutions. We ap- 
point committees or boards or commis- 
sions. We hold endless conferences. We 
issue propaganda material. We have 
street processions. We use placards and 
billboards. We found institutions, and 
devise machinery. We have collisions 
between "pros" and "antis" and stir 
up enthusiasm and passion for our 
"cause." The Christian Church is prob- 
ably the most impressive instance of 
organization in the entire history of 
man's undertakings. It has become, in 
its historical development, almost in- 
finitely complex, with organizations 
within organizations and suborganiza- 
tions within suborganizations. It has 
employed every known expedient, even 
the sword, for the advancement of its 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 25 

"cause," it has created a perfect maze 
of institutions and it has originated a 
vast variety of educational methods for 
carrying forward its truth. 

But great as has been the historical 
emphasis on organization, it nevertheless 
occupies a very slender place in the con- 
sciousness of Christ. There is no clear 
indication that He appointed any officials, 
or organized any society, or founded any 
institution. There are two "sayings" in 
Matthew which use the word "Church," 
but they almost certainly bear the mark 
and coloring of a later time, when the 
Church had already come into existence 
and had formed its practices and its 
traditions. And even though the great 
"saying" at Csesarea Philippi were ac- 
cepted as the actual words of Jesus, it is 
still quite possible to see in it the an- 
nouncement of a spiritual fellowship, 
spreading by inspiration and contagion, 
rather than the founding of an official 
institution. It is, no doubt, fortunate 
on the whole that the Church was or- 



26 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

ganized, and that the great idea found a 
visible body through which to express it- 
self, though nobody can fail to see that 
the Church, while meaning to propagate 
the gospel, has always profoundly modified 
and transformed it, and that it has brought 
into play a great many tendencies foreign 
to the original gospel. 

Christ's way of propagating the truth 
— the way that inherently fits the inner 
life and spirit of the gospel of the King- 
dom — was the way of personal con- 
tagion. Instead of founding an institu- 
tion, or organizing an official society, or 
forming a system, or creating external 
machinery, He counted almost wholly 
upon the spontaneous and dynamic in- 
fluence of life upon life, of personality 
upon personality. He would produce a 
new world, a new social order, through 
the contagious and transmissive character 
of personal goodness. He practically ig- 
nored, or positively rejected, the method 
of restraint, and trusted absolutely to the 
conquering power of loyalty and consecra- 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 27 

tion. It was His faith that, if you get 
into the world anywhere a seed of the 
Kingdom, a nucleus of persons who ex- 
hibit the blessed life, who are dedicated 
to expanding goodness, who rely im- 
plicitly on love and sympathy, who try 
in meek patience the slow method that 
is right, who still feel the clasping hands 
of love even when they go through pain 
and trial and loss r this seed-spirit will 
spread, this nucleus will enlarge and 
create a society. If the new spirit of 
passionate love, and of uncalculating good- 
ness gets formed in one person, by a 
silent alchemy a group of persons will 
soon become permeated and charged with 
the same spirit, new conditions will be 
formed, and in time children will be born 
into a new social environment^and will suck 
in new ideals with their mother's milk. 

Persons of the blessed life, Christ says, 
are the saving salt of the earth. They 
carry their wholesome savor into every- 
thing they touch. They do not try to 
save themselves. They are ready like 






28 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

salt to dissolve and disappear, but, the 
more they give themselves away, the 
more antiseptic and preservative they 
become to the society in which they live. 
They keep the old world from spoiling 
and corrupting not by attack and re- 
straint, not by excision and amputation, 
but by pouring the preservative savor of 
their lives of goodness into all the chan- 
nels of the world. This preservative and 
saving influence on society depends, how- 
ever, entirely on the continuance of the 
inner quality of life and it will be certain 
to cease if ever the salt lose its savor, i.e. 
if the soul of religion wanes or dies away 
and only the outer form of it remains. 

But such lives are more than antiseptic 
and preservative ; they are kindling and 
illuminative. They become "candles of 
the Lord." Candles emit their light and 
kindle other candles by burning them- 
selves up and transmitting their flame. 
When a life is set on fire, and is radiant 
with self-consuming love, it will invariably 
set other lives on fire. Such a person may 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 29 

teach many valuable ideas, he may organize 
many movements, he may attack many evil 
customs, but the best thing he will ever do 
will be to fuse and kindle other souls with 
the fire of his passion. His own burning, 
shining life is always his supreme service. 

"The greatest legacy the hero leaves his race 
Is — to have been a hero." 

Such a person will be eager to decrease 
that his kindling power may increase. 
He will not care to save himself, or to 
reap a reward for his service. He may 
not even know that he is shining, like the 
early saint who "wist not that his face 
did shine." But for all that, men will 
see the way by his light and will catch 
the glory of living because he exhibits it. 
He can no more be hid than can a hill-top 
city, or the headlight of a locomotive, or 
the newly risen sun. 

That is Christ's way of spreading the 
life of the Kingdom, that is His method 
of propagating the inner spirit, and of 
producing a society of blessed people. 



30 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 



THE SECOND MILE 

It may seem to some incongruous to be 
writing about an inner way of life in these 
days when action is felt by so many to be 
the only reality and when in every direc- 
tion outside there is dire human need to 
be met. 

"Leave, then, your wonted prattle, 
The oaten reed forbear ; 
For I hear a sound of battle, 
And trumpets rend the air." 

But more than ever is it necessary for 
us to center down to eternal principles 
of life and action, to attain and maintain 
the right inner spirit, and to see what in 
its faith and essence Christianity really 
means. Precisely now when the Sermon 
on the Mount seems least to be the pro- 
gram of action and the map of life, is it 
a suitable time for us to endeavor to dis- 
cover what Christ's way means, by look- 
ing through the literal phrases in clair- 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 31 

voyant fashion to the spirit treasured and 
embalmed within the wonderful words ? 

There is one phrase which seems to me 
to be, in a rare and peculiar degree, the 
key to the entire gospel — I mean the 
invitation to go "the second mile": 
"If any man compel you to go a mile, 
go two miles." It is always dangerous, 
I know, to fly away from the literal sig- 
nificance of words and to indulge in far- 
fetched "spiritual" interpretations. But 
it is even more dangerous, perhaps, to 
read words of oriental imagery and para- 
dox as though they were the plain prose 
speech of the occidental mind, and to be 
taken only at their face value. 

There will probably always be Tolstoys 
— great or small — who will make the 
difficult, and never very successful, ex- 
periment of taking this and the other 
"commands" of the Sermon on the Mount 
in a literal and legalistic sense, but to do 
so is almost certainly to be "slow of 
heart," and to miss Christ's meaning. 
Whatever else may be true or false in 



32 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

our interpretations of the teachings of 
Christ, it may always be taken for certain 
that He did not inaugurate a religion of 
the legalistic type, consisting of com- 
mands and exact directions, to be liter- 
ally followed and obeyed as a way to 
secure merit and reward. TV go "the 
second mile," then, is an attitude and 
character of spirit rather than a mere 
rule and formula for the legs. 

Christ always shows a very slender 
appreciation of any act of religion or of 
ethics which does not reach beyond the 
* stage of compulsion. What is done be- 
cause it must be done; because the law 
requires it, or because society expects it, 
or because convention prescribes it, or 
because the doer of it is afraid of conse- 
quences if he omits it, may, of course, be 
rightly done and meritoriously done, but 
an act on that level is not yet quite in 
the region where for Christ the highest 
moral and religious acts have their spring. 
The typical Pharisee was an appalling 
instance of the inadequacy of "the first- 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 33 

mile" kind of religion and ethics. He 
plodded his hard mile, and "did all the 
things required" of him. In the region 
of commands, or "touching the law" he 
was "blameless." But there was no spon- 
taneity in his religion, no free initiative, 
no enthusiastic passion, no joyous abandon, 
no gratuitous and uncalculating acts. He 
did things enough, but he did them be- 
cause he had to do them, not because 
some mighty love possessed him and 
flooded him and inspired him to go not 
only the expected mile, but to go on 
without any calculation out beyond mile- 
stones altogether. Just here appears the 
new inner way of Christ's religion. The 
legalist, like the rich young man, "does 
all the things that are commanded in 
the law," but still painfully "lacks" 
something. To get into Christ's way, 
to "follow" in any real sense, he must 
cut his cables and swing out from the 
moorings where he is tied. He must 
catch such a passion of love that giving 
either of his money or of himself, shall 



34 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

no longer be for him an imposed duty 
but rather a joy of spirit. 

The parable of the "great surprise" is 
another illustration, a glorious illustra- 
tion, of the spirit of the "second mile." 
The "blessed ones" in the picture (which 
is an unveiling of actual everyday life in 
its eternal meaning rather than a por- 
traiture of the day of judgment) find 
themselves at home with God, drawn 
into His presence, crowned with His 
approval, and sealed with His fellowship. 
They are surprised. They had not been 
adding up their merits or calculating 
their chances of winning heaven. They 
are beautifully artless and naive: "When 
saw we Thee hungry and fed Thee?" 
They have been doing deeds of love, say- 
ing kind words, relieving human need, 
banishing human loneliness, making life 
easier and more joyous, because they 
had caught a spirit of love and tender- 
ness, and, therefore, "could not do other- 
wise," and now they suddenly discover 
that those whom they helped and rescued 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 35 

and served were bound up in one insepa- 
rable life with God himself, so that what 
was done to them was done to Him, and 
they find that their spontaneous and un- 
calculating love was one in essence and 
substance with the love of God and that 
they are eternally at home with Him. 

The tender, immortal stories of the 
woman who broke her alabaster vase of 
precious nard and "filled all the house 
with the odor," and of the woman (per- 
haps the same one) who had been a 
sinner and who from her passion of love 
for her great forgiveness wet Christ's 
feet with her tears, even before she could 
open her cruse of ointment, are the finest 
possible illustrations of the spirit of "the 
second mile." They picture, in subtly 
suggestive imagery, the immense contrast 
between the spontaneous, uncalculating 
act of one who "loves much" and does 
with grace what love prompts ; and acts, 
on the other hand, like that of Simon 
the pharisaic host, who offers Jesus a 
purely conventional and grudging hos- 



36 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

pitality, or like that of the disciples who 
sit indeed at the table with Jesus but 
come to it absorbed with the burning 
question, "who among us is to be first 
and greatest," not only at the table but 
"in the Kingdom!" 

What grace and unexpected love come 
into action in the simple deed of the 
"Samaritan" who, from nobility of na- 
ture, does what official Priest and Levite 
leave undone ! The hated foreigner, spit 
at and stoned as he walked the roads of 
Judea, under no obligation to be kind or 
serviceable, is the real "neighbor," the 
bearer of balm and healing, the dispenser 
of love and sympathy. He may have 
no ordination to the priesthood, but he 
finely exhibits the attitude of grace which 
belongs in the religion of "the second 
mile." 

But we do not reach the full significance 
of "the second mile" until we see that it 
is something more than the highest level 
of human grace. What shines through 
the gospels everywhere, like a new-risen 



Ch. I] THE INNER WAY 37 

sun, is the revelation that this — this 
grace of the second mile — is the supreme 
trait and character-nature of God as 
well. How surprising and unexpected is 
that extraordinary unveiling of the divine 
nature in the story of the prodigal boy ! 
It is wonderful enough that one who has 
wasted his substance and squandered his 
own very life should still be able in his 
squalor and misery to come to himself 
and want to go home ; but the fact which 
radiates this sublime story like a glory 
is the uncalculating, ungrudging, un- 
limited love of the Father, which remains 
unchanged by the boy's blunder, which 
has never failed in the period of his ab- 
sence, and which bursts out in the cry 
of joy: "This my son was dead and is 
alive again, he was lost and is found." 

It is, and always has been, the very 
center of our Christian faith that the 
real nature and character of God come 
full into view in Christ, that God is in 
mind and heart and will revealed in the 
Person whom we call Christ. "The 



38 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. I 

grace," then, "of the Lord Jesus Christ," 
of which we are reminded in that great 
word of apostolic benediction, is a true 
manifestation of the deepest nature and 
character of God Himself. The Cross 
is not an . artificial scheme. The Cross 
is the eternal grace, the spontaneous, 
uncalculating love of God made visible 
and vocal in our temporal world. It is 
the apotheosis of the spirit of the second 
mile. 



CHAPTER II 
THE KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 



BAGS THAT WAX NOT OLD 

The ancient world found it very diffi- 
cult to keep money even after it was got. 
There were almost constant wars involv- 
ing the dire stripping of the unprotected 
country districts, and the siege and devas- 
tation of cities. In those times almost 
everything was fragile. It was never easy 
to discover any form of wealth that was 
surely abiding. Even if the besom of an 
invading army did not sweep away the 
labor of years, still there were other 
enemies to be feared. Tyrants were al- 
ways on the watch for ways of relieving 
wealthy men of their treasures. There 
were robber bands lying in wait for the 
traveler, and neighborhood thieves found 

39 



40 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. II 

it a small matter to break into private 
houses and to steal hidden money. It 
was no uncommon thing for men to dig 
in the ground and hide the talent which 
they had saved, or to bury the pearl of 
great price, or other precious jewel, in a 
field. If one invested his wealth in gar- 
ments, then another enemy was to be 
feared. The moth is as old as clothes, 
and he got in even where the thief failed 
to break through. 

The problem of getting an indestructible 
money-bag was, thus, a problem of first 
importance. A journey to Jericho might 
any day reduce a man to primitive con- 
ditions, or a passing army might make 
him a beggar, or the visit of a thief might 
strip him of all his living, or the silent 
work of a brood of moths might ruin the 
savings of years. There were no perdur- 
able purses, no nonbreakable banks, no 
irreducible forms of wealth. 

Christ evidently recognized that there 
was a value in money. He did not ap- 
parently demand from his follower the 



Ch. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 41 

absolute renunciation of ownership. He 
expounded no new theory of economics. 
But he was profoundly impressed by the 
moral havoc and the social calamities 
caused by the excessive ambition for, and 
pursuit of, wealth. He saw how the mad 
rush for money and the overvaluation 
of it killed out the noblest fundamental 
traits of the soul, and, more than all 
else, he felt the tragedy of human lives 
being focused with intensity of strain 
and fixed with burning passion on the 
pursuit of such pitiably fragile treasures 
— money-bags of all sorts waxing old 
and becoming incapable of holding the 
hoard that absorbed the whole life. 

Christ, then, proposes a new kind of 
purse, an indestructible and immutable 
treasure-bag — "make for yourselves bags 
that wax not old." Such purses are not 
on the market, they cannot be purchased, 
they must be woven by each person for 
himself, and they must be woven, if at 
all, out of the stuff of life itself. We here 
pass over, as so often in Christ's teaching, 



42 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. II 

from extrinsic wealth to intrinsic, from 
the wealth which men merely possess to 
the kind of wealth which they can them- 
selves be. We once more find ourselves 
brought to an inner way of living, where 
the issue is no longer how to accumulate 
goods, but rather how to become good. 
The problem is the problem of what men 
live by. We are called to loosen our 
grip on perishable treasures only that we 
may tighten our hold on heavenly, i.e. 
spiritual, treasure. We are shown the 
folly of spending a life building barns for 
expanding earthly possessions, while we 
are taking no pains to make ourselves 
rich in God. 

What is it, then, that men live by ? 
What will prove to be imperishable wealth, 
whether we are in this world, or in any 
other world of real moral issues ? It is 
obviously not money, for men often live 
nobly after the money-bag has waxed old 
and after the bank has failed, and it is our 
most elemental faith that life blossoms 
out into its consummate richness after all 



Ch. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 43 

earthly affairs come to a complete close, 
and after every penny of visible wealth 
has been left forever behind. Money is 
plainly not intrinsic treasure; love is, 
goodness is, joy is. A beloved disciple, 
in a moment of inspiration, announced 
the profound truth that love is "of God." 
Men wrongly divide love into two types, 
"human love" and "divine love," but 
in reality there is only love. Wherever 
love has become the nature of the soul, 
and it has become "natural" now to for- 
get self for others, to seek to give rather 
than to get, to share rather than to pos- 
sess, to be impoverished in order that 
some loved one may abound, there a 
divine and Godlike spirit has been formed. 
And we now come upon a new kind of 
wealth, a kind that accumulates with use, 
because it is a law that the more the spirit 
of love is exercised, the more the soul 
spends itself in love, so much the more 
love it has, the richer it grows, the 
diviner its nature becomes. But at the 
same time, it is a fact that love is never 



44 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. II 

complete, never reaches its full scope and 
measure until our love takes on an eternal 
aspect — until we love God in Himself 
or love Him in our loved ones. One 
reason why love is exalted by death is 
that we no longer love our immortal loved 
one in any narrow and selfish way; we 
love now for pure love's sake, and the 
truest of all treasures which can be laid 
up in imperishable bags is this stock of 
unalloyed love for that which is most 
lovely — for God and for souls that are 
given to us to bring some of His nature 
closer to our human hearts. 

Goodness is, of course, notoriously hard 
to define. It is never an abstract quality 
that can be described by logical concepts. 
It is a way of living, a way of acting, a 
way of working out relationships. It is, 
like love, a cumulative thing. To be 
good inherently means to be becoming 
better, to be on the way to an unattained 
goal of action, or of character. It is the 
glory of going on to be perfect like our 
Father in heaven. To be rich in goodness 



Ch. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 45 

of character, therefore, is to be on the way 
to become ever richer, however long the 
journey lasts, however far the spiral winds, 
for goodness, like love, is of God, and 
steadily assimilates our imperfect human 
nature to the perfect divine nature. 

Joy is, perhaps, not often thought of as 
one of the things men live by, as the soul's 
eternal wealth. Life is so full of sorrow 
and pain that joy seems like a fleeting, 
vanishing asset. But that is because joy 
is confused with pleasure. True joy is 
not a thing of moods, not a capricious 
emotion, tied to fluctuating experiences. 
It is a state and condition of the soul. 
It survives through pain and sorrow and, 
like a subterranean spring, waters the 
whole life. It is intimately allied and 
bound up with love and goodness, and so 
is deeply rooted in the life of God. Joy 
is the most perfect and complete mark 
and sign of immortal wealth, because it 
indicates that the soul is living by love 
and by goodness, and is very rich in 
God. 



46 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. II 

II 

OTHERISM 
{Matt. VII. I-I2) 

Altruism is an honored word. Other- 
ism is only recently coined and has not 
yet become widely current in good speech. 
We need, however, a word that has more 
inward depth than altruism usually carries, 
and perhaps otherism will eventually take 
that vacant place. 

Not merely in these days of war, but in 
all our human relations all the time we 
greatly need to get the interior vision 
which enables us to understand from 
within those with whom we live and work. 
Nobody sees life correctly until he has 
corrected his own views, by a true apprecia- 
tion of the views of others. From the 
outside it is impossible to estimate any life 
fairly. We have long ago learned that 
we can get no true account of any historical 
character unless we have a historian who 
can put himself in the place of the person 
he is describing. He must have imagina- 



Ch. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 47 

tion and be able to see clearly the con- 
ditions and forces, the influences and the 
atmosphere in which the man lived. The 
problems which he had to deal with, the 
conceptions which governed men's thoughts 
when he lived — all these must be under- 
stood, before we can get any estimate of 
the man himself. The same sort of 
imagination is necessary to judge the 
person who lives next door. We dare 
not pronounce upon him until we know 
all that he has to face. If we could once 
feel his quivering spirit and could see 
his inward struggles, we could not set up 
our private tribunal and pass our cold 
individual judgment upon him. The 
real remedy for this hard critical spirit 
which breaks society up into independent 
units is the spirit of love, the spirit of 
otherism. 

The moment we put ourselves in the 
place of others, and pronounce no judgment 
upon persons until we have seen all the 
circumstances of their life, a new state of 
things at once appears. Genuine sym- 



48 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. II 

pathy, clear interior insight into the 
personality of others, immediately creates 
a new world. The trouble too often is 
that we see all the defects in others and 
forget our own. We want to take the 
mote out of another person's eye while 
all the time there is a whole fence rail in 
our own. Christ's rule is to make one- 
self perfect before one goes to correcting 
others. "Let him who is without sin 
cast the first stone." 

There is another situation also which 
would be remedied if we learned to put 
ourselves in the other person's place — if 
we had the spirit of otherism. Christ 
sums it up in the proverb about casting 
pearls before swine, i.e. giving what is a 
misfit. Many of our well-meant charities 
are of this sort. We blunder in our efforts 
to help poor needy people, because we do 
not get their point of view. We do not 
live our way into their lives. There is no 
fit between our gift and their need. They 
get a stone for bread. 

The same thing happens in much of our 



Ch. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 49 

public speaking. Many persons have the 
barbarous habit of never imagining the 
listeners' point of view. They go on 
speaking as unconscious of the condition 
confronting them as the hose pipe is when 
the water is turned on. The remedy 
again is otherism. It is impossible to 
help anybody with a message until you 
can in some measure share his life. 

"The Holy Supper is kept, indeed, 
In whatso we share with another's need." 

This teaching is all summed up in the 
golden rule, "All things that ye would 
that men should do unto you do ye also 
unto them." It is clear at once that to do 
this one must cultivate both his spirit 
of love and his power of imagination. It 
is never enough to want to help a person. 
We must put ourself in his place and be 
able to do what really will help him. It 
would appear, therefore, that the most 
difficult and at the same time the most 
heavenly attainment in the world is 
sympathy — the spirit of otherism. 



50 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. II 

III 

SCAVENGERS AND THE KINGDOM 

We no longer expect a world of perfect 
conditions to appear by sudden interven- 
tion. We have explained so many things 
by the discovery of antecedent develop- 
mental processes that we have leaped to 
the working faith that all things come 
that way. We do, no doubt, find un- 
bridged gaps in the enormous series of 
events that have culminated in our present 
world, and we must admit that nature 
seems sometimes to desert her usual placid 
way of process for what looks like a steeple- 
chase of sudden " jumps," but we feel 
pretty sure that even these "jumps" have 
been slowly prepared for and are themselves 
part of the process-method. 

Then, too, we find it very difficult to 
conceive how a spiritual kingdom — a 
world which is built and held together 
by the inner gravitation of love — could 
come by a fiat, or a stroke, or a jet. The 
qualities which form and characterize the 



Ch. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 51 

kingdom of God are all qualities that are 
born and cultivated within by personal 
choices, by the formation of rightly- 
fashioned wills, by the growth of love and 
sympathy in the heart, by the creation of 
pure and elevated desires. Those traits 
must be won and achieved. They cannot 
be shot into souls from without. If, 
therefore, we are to expect the crowning 
age that shall usher in a world in which 
wrath and hate no longer destroy, from 
which injustice is banished and the central 
law of which is love like that of Christ's, 
then we must look for this age, it seems to 
me, to come by slow increments and gains 
of advancing personal and social good- 
ness, and by divine and human processes 
already at work in some degree in the 
lives of men. 

Christ often seems to teach this view. 
There is a strand in his sayings that 
certainly implies a kingdom coming by a 
long process of slow spiritual gains. There 
is first the seed, then the blade, then the 
ear and finally the full corn in the ear. 



52 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. II 

The mustard seed, though so minute and 
tiny, is a type of the kingdom because it 
contains the potentiality of a vast growth 
and expansion. The yeast is likewise a 
figure of ever-growing, permeating, pene- 
trating living force which in time leavens 
the whole mass. The kingdom is fre- 
quently described as an inner life, a 
victorious spirit. It " comes" when God's 
will is done in a person as it is done in 
heaven, and, therefore, it is not a spec- 
tacle to be "observed," like the passing 
of Caesar's legions, or the installation of a 
new ruler. But, on the other hand, there 
are plainly many sayings which point 
toward the expectation of a mighty sud- 
den event. We seem, again and again, to 
be hearing not of process, but of apocalypse, 
not of slow development, but of a myste- 
rious leap. There can be no question that 
most devout Jews of the first century ex- 
pected the world's relief expedition to come 
by miracle, and it is evident that there 
was an intense hope in the minds of men 
that, in one way or another, God would 



Ch. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 53 

intervene and put things right. Many 
think that Christ shared that hope and 
expectation. It is of course possible that 
in sharing, as He did, the actual life of 
man, He partook of the hopes and trav- 
ails and expectations of His times. But, 
I think, we need to go very slowly and 
cautiously in this direction. To interpret 
Christ's message mainly in terms of 
apocalypse and sudden interventions is 
surely to miss its naturalness, its spiritual 
vision, and its inward depth. We can well 
admit that nobody then had quite our 
modern conception of process or our pres- 
ent day dislike of breaks, interruptions, 
and interventions. There was no difficulty 
in thinking of a new age or dispensation 
miraculously inaugurated. Only it looks 
as though Christ had discovered an ethical 
and spiritual way which made it unneces- 
sary to count on miracle. There was much 
refuse to be consumed, much corruption to 
be removed, before the new condition of 
life could be in full play, but He seems to 
have seen that the consuming fire and the 



\y 



54 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. II 

cleansing work were an essential and in- 
herent part of the process that was bring- 
ing the kingdom. 

When he was asked where men were to 
look for the kingdom, His answer was 
that they were to find a figure and parable 
of it in the normal process of nature's 
scavengers. The carcass lies decaying in 
the sun, corrupting the air and tainting 
everything in its region. There can be 
no wholesome conditions of life in that 
spot until the corruption is removed. But 
nature has provided a way of cleansing the 
air. The scavenger comes and removes 
the refuse and corruption and turns it 
by a strange alchemy into living matter. 
Life feeds on the decaying refuse, raises 
it back into life, and cleanses the world by 
making even corruption minister to its 
own life processes. We could not live an 
hour in our world if it were not alive with 
a myriad variety of scavenging methods 
that burn up effete matter, transmute 
noxious forms into wholesome stuff, cleanse 
away the poisons, and transmute, not by 



Ch. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 55 

an apocalypse, but by a process, death into 
life and corruption into sweetness. May 
not the vulture, like the tiny sparrow who 
cannot fall without divine regard, be a 
sign, a figure, a parable ? When we look 
for the kingdom, in the light of this sign, 
we shall not search the clouds of heaven, 
we shall not consult "the number of the 
beast" — we shall look for it wherever 
we see life conquering death, wherever the 
white tents of love are pitched against the 
black tents of hate, wherever the living 
forces of goodness are battering down the 
strongholds of evil, wherever the sinner 
is being changed to a saint, wherever 
ancient survivals of instinct and custom 
are yielding to the sway of growing vision 
and insight and ideal. It is "slow and 
late" to come, this kingdom! So was 
life slow to come, while all that was to be 

"Whirl'd for a million aeons thro' the vast 
Waste dawn of multitudinous-eddying light." 

So was man slow to come, while fan- 
tastic creatures were " tearing each other 



56 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. II 

in the slime." So was a spirit-governed 

Person slow to come, while men lived in 

lust and war and hate. But in God's world 

at length the things that ought to come do 

come, and we may faintly guess by what 

we see that the kingdom, too, is coming. 

There is something like it now in some 

lives. 

IV 

" THE BEYOND IS WITHIN " 

Among the parables of Christ there is 
a very impressive one on the shut door. 
It is a story of ten country maidens who 
were invited to a wedding. They were to 
meet the bridegroom coming from a dis- 
tance, as soon as his arrival should be 
announced, and with their lighted lamps 
they were to guide him and his attendants 
through the darkness to the home of the 
bride, where the banquet and the festal 
dance were to be held. 

For many days these simple maidens 
had been living in the thrilling expecta- 
tion of the great event in which they were 
to take a leading part. 



Ch. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 57 

They had been busy with their prepara- 
tions, drilling their rhythmic steps, and 
talking eagerly of the approaching night. 
But five of them foolishly neglected the 
critically important part of the prepara- 
tion — they took no oil to supply their 
lamps and at the dramatic moment they 
found themselves compelled to withdraw 
from the joyous throng and to go in search 
of the necessary equipment. When at 
length they arrived with their oil, the 
illuminated procession was over and the 
door of the festal house was shut. 

The simple maidens soon discovered 
that there was a stern finality to this 
shut door. Their blunder had irrevocable 
consequences. They may have had other 
interesting opportunities as life went on, 
but they forever missed this joyous pro- 
cession and this wedding feast. "Too 
late, too late. Ye cannot enter now." 

Christ turns this common, trivial neigh- 
borhood incident into a parable of the 
Kingdom of God. Those who believe 
that He was looking, as so many in His 



58 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. II 

time were looking, for a sudden shift of 
dispensations and for a Kingdom to be 
ushered in by a stupendous apocalyptic 
event, find in this irrevocably shut door 
of the parable a figure of the doom of 
those who failed to prepare for the sudden 
coming of this crisis, decisive of the destiny 
of men. 

But there is another, and, I think, a 
truer, way of interpreting this shut door. 
There is a stern finality to all opportuni- 
ties that have been missed and to all high 
occasions that have been blundered and 
bungled. All decisions of the will, all 
choices of life have, in their very nature, 
apocalyptic finality. They suddenly re- 
veal and unveil character and they are 
loaded with destiny which can be changed 
only by a change of character. Other 
opportunities may offer themselves and 
new chances may indeed come, but when 
any choice has been made or any oppor- 
tunity has been missed that chance has 
gone by and that door is shut. 

The football player who has had a 



Ch. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 59 

chance in the great game of the year to 
make a goal, and instead of doing it 
fumbled the ball and lost the opportunity 
to score, may just possibly have another 
chance sometime, but no apologies and 
no explanations can ever change the 
apocalyptic finality of that fumble. 

Something like that is involved in all 
the spiritual issues of life, and our deeds 
and attitudes are all the time irrevocably 
opening or shutting doors, which prove 
to be doors to the Kingdom of God. 
Christ may possibly at times have looked 
for some sudden revelation of destiny, 
but surely for the most part He looked 
for the momentous issues of the Kingdom 
within the soul itself rather than in a 
spectacular event in the outer world. 
This principle throws light on all Christ's 
sayings about the future. The coming 
destiny is not in the stars, it is not in the 
sentence of a Great Assize, it is not in the 
sudden shift of " dispensations " ; it is in 
the character and inner nature, as they 
have been formed within each soul. The 



60 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. II 

thing to be concerned about is not so much 
a day of judgment or an apocalyptic 
moment, as the trend of the will, the atti- 
tude of the spirit, the formation of inner 
disposition and character. We are al- 
ways facing issues of an eternal aspect, 
and every day is a day of judgment, re- 
vealing the line of march and the issues 
of destiny. Conversion crises are for- 
tunately possible, when suddenly a new 
level of life may be reached and a fresh 
start may be made, and in this inner 
world of personality, there are always new 
possibilities occurring, but, as at oriental 
marriage feasts, neglected opportunities 
are irreversibly neglected, shut doors are 
irrevocably shut, and blunders that affect 
the issues of the soul have an apocalyptic 
finality about them. New dispensations 
may await us ; the Kingdom may come 
in ways we never dreamed of ; the beyond 
may be more momentous than we have 
ever expected, but always and everywhere 
"the within" determines "the beyond," 
and character is destiny. 



Ch. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 61 



THE ATTITUDE TOWARD THE UNSEEN 

" Nowhere as yet has history spoken in 
favor of the ideal of a morality without 
religion. New active forces of will, so 
far as we can observe, have always arisen 
in conjunction with ideas about the un- 
seen." So wrote the great German his- 
torian and philosopher, Wilhelm Dilthey. 
The greatest experts in the field both of 
ethics and of religion agree with this view. 
Henry Sidgwick and Leslie Stephen are 
experts in the field of ethics who cannot 
be suspected of holding a brief for religion, 
and yet Sidgwick says: "Ethics is an 
imperfect science alone. It must run 
up into religion to complete itself;" and 
Leslie Stephen says: "Morality and re- 
ligion stand or fall together." Spinoza, 
who was denounced during his lifetime as 
an atheist and a destroyer of the faith, 
nevertheless makes love of God the whole 
basis of genuine ethics, insisting that there 
is no morality conceivable without love of 



62 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. II 

God. St. Augustine's famous testimony- 
may suffice as a religious expert's view. 
He says, "Love God and then you may 
do what you please," meaning, of course, 
that you cannot then approve a wrong 
course of action or of life. 

Nowhere, certainly, are religion and 
ethics so wonderfully fused into one in- 
dissoluble whole as in the experience and 
teaching of Christ. This appears not 
only in His supreme rule for religion and 
for good conduct: "Thou shalt love God 
with all thy powers and thy neighbor as 
thyself," but still more does it appear 
in the inner steps and processes which 
underlie and prepare the way for the 
decisions and acts of Christ's own life. 
Here, unmistakably, all the active forces of 
will arose in conjunction with ideas about 
the unseen. 

It is the modern custom to talk much 
about the ethics of Jesus and to see in the 
Sermon on the Mount an ideal of human 
personality and a program for an ideal 
social order. But a careful reader cannot 



Ch. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 63 

fail to feel in Christ's teaching the com- 
plete fusion of His ideal for the individual 
and for society with His consciousness of 
the world of unseen realities. The new 
person and the new society are possible 
in His thought, only through unbroken 
correspondence with the world of higher 
forces and of perfect conditions. The 
only way to be perfect is to be on the way 
toward likeness to the heavenly Father, 
the only moral dynamic that will work 
is a love, like that of God's love, which 
expels all selfishness and all tendency to 
stop at partial and inadequate goods. 
If any kingdom of heavenly conditions 
is ever to be expected on earth, if ever 
we may hope for a day to dawn when the 
divine will is to be exhibited among men 
and they are to live the love-way of 
goodness, it is because God is our Father 
and we have the possibilities of His nature. 
The ethical ideals of the Kingdom are 
inherently attached to the prayer ex- 
perience of Jesus. The kind of human 
world which His faith builds for men is 



64 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. II 

forever linked to the kind of God to whom 
He prays. Cut the link and both worlds 
fall away. We cannot shuffle the cold, 
hard, loveless atoms of our social world 
into lovely forms of cooperative relation- 
ship. The atoms must be changed. In 
some way we must learn how to lift men 
into the faith which Christ had, that God 
is the Father who is seeking to draw us 
all into correspondence with His unseen 
world of Life and Love. "After this 
manner pray ye. Our heavenly Father 
of the holy name, thy Kingdom come, 
Thy will be done on earth as it is in 
heaven." The two faiths make one faith 
— the faith in a Father-God who cares, 
and the faith in the realization of an ideal 
society based on cooperative love. 

"And as He was praying, the fashion 
of His countenance was altered and His 
raiment became white and dazzling." 
This is a simple, synoptic account of an 
experience attaching to a supreme crisis 
of personal decision in the life of Jesus. 
His so-called ethics, as I have been in- 



Ch. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 65 

sisting, is indivisibly bound up with His 
attitude toward the unseen, with His ex- 
perience of a realm where what ought to 
be, really is. So, too, it is because He has 
found His inward relation with God that 
He makes His great decision to go forward 
toward Jerusalem, to meet the onset of 
opposition, to see His work frustrated by 
the rulers of the nation, to suffer and to 
die at the hands of His enemies. The 
Transfiguration has been treated as a 
myth and again as a misplaced resurrec- 
tion story. But it is certainly best to 
treat it as a genuine psychological narra- 
tive which fits reality and life at every 
point. As the clouds darken and the 
danger threatens and the successful issue 
of His mission seems impossible, Jesus 
falls back upon God, brings His spirit 
into absolute parallelism with the heavenly 
will and accepts whatever may be in- 
volved in the pursuit of the course to 
which He is committed. When He pushes 
back into the inner experience of relation 
with His Father and the circuit of con- 



66 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. II 

nection closes and living faith floods 
through Him and fixes His decision un- 
alterably to go forward, His face and 
form are transfigured and illuminated 
through the experience of union. This 
prayer of illumination reported in the 
gospels, is not an isolated instance, a 
solitary experience. The altered face, the 
changed body, the glorified figure, the 
radiation of light, have marked many a 
subordinate saint, and may well have 
characterized the Master as He found 
the true attitude of soul toward the unseen 
and formed His momentous decision to 
be faithful unto death in His manifesta- 
tion of love. 

In Gethsemane, as the awful moment 
came nearer, once more we catch a glimpse 
of His attitude to the unseen. In place 
of illuminated form and shining garments, 
we hear now of a face covered with the 
sweat and blood of agony. Just in front 
are the shouting rabble, the cross and the 
nails, the defeat of lifelong hopes and 
the defection of the inner fellowship, but 



Ch. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 67 

the triumphant spirit within Him unites 
with the infinite will that is steering the 
world and piloting all lives, and calmly 
acquiesces with it. But to this suffering 
soul, battling in the dark night of agony, 
the infinite will is no abstract Power, no 
blind fate, to be dumbly yielded to. The 
great word which breaks out from these 
quivering lips is the dear word for " Father " 
that the little child's lips have learned to 
say : " Abba." The will above is His will 
now and He goes forward to the pain and 
death in the strength of communion and 
fellowship with His Abba-Father. There 
may have been a single moment of desola- 
tion in the agony of the next day when the 
cry escaped, "My God, why hast thou 
forsaken me?" but immediately the inner 
spirit recovers its connection and its con- 
fidence and the crucifixion ends, as it 
should, with the words of triumphant 
faith, "Father, into thy hands I intrust 
my spirit." 

The most important fact of this Life, 
which has ever since poured Alpine streams 



68 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. II 

of power into the life of the world, is its 
attitude toward the unseen. We miss the 
heart of things when we reduce the gospel 
to ethics or when we transform it into dry 
theology. Through all the story and be- 
hind all the teaching is the mighty inner 
fact of an intimate personal experience of 
God as Father. To live is to be about the 
" Father's business." In great moments 
of intercourse there comes to Him a flood- 
ing consciousness of sonship, joyous both 
to Father and Son: "In Him I am well 
pleased," and in times of strain and 
tragedy the onward course is possible 
because the inner bond holds fast and the 
Abba-experience abides. 

It is not strange that a synoptic writer 
reports the saying: "No man knoweth 
the Father but the Son." The passage as 
it stands reported in Matthew may be 
colored by later theology, but there is a 
nucleus of absolute truth hidden in the 
saying. There is no other way to know 
God but this way of inner love-experience. 
Only a son can know a Father. Only one 



Ch. II] KINGDOM WITHIN THE SOUL 69 

who has trodden the wine-press in anguish 
and pain, and through it all has felt the 
enfolding love of an Abba-father really 
knows. Mysticism has its pitfalls and its 
limitations, but this much is sound and 
true, that the way to know God is to have 
inner heart's experience of Him, like the 
experience of the Son. 



CHAPTER III 
SOME PROPHETS OF THE INNER WAY 



THE PSALMIST'S WAY 

Emerson's friend, Margaret Fuller, 
coined the phrase, ." standing the uni- 
verse." "I can stand the universe," was 
her brave statement. But long before 
Concord was discovered or "the tran- 
scendental school" was dreamed of a school 
of Hebrew saints had learned how to 
stand the universe. 

Canaan, with all its milk and honey, 
was never a land arranged by preestab- 
lished harmony as a paradise for the 
idealist. It enjoyed no special millennium 
privileges. Whatever rainbow dreams 
may have filled the mind of optimistic 
prophets were always quickly put to 
flight by the iron facts of the rigid world 

70 



Ch. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 71 

which ringed them round. The Philis- 
tines were pitiless neighbors. Like 
Gawain, they were spiritually too blind 
even to have desires to see. Coats of 
mail, gigantic spear heads, iron chariots, 
and Goliath champions were their argu- 
ments. How could a nation like Israel 
be free to work out its spiritual career 
with these crude materialistic Philistines 
always hanging on its borders and always 
threatening its national existence ? When 
the Philistines were temporarily quiet 
there were Moabites, or Edomites, or 
Syrians ready to take a turn at hamper- 
ing the ideals of Israel. And worse still 
was ahead. From the time of the battle 
of Karkar (854 B.C.) on, the armies of 
Assyria had to be reckoned with. Here 
was another pitiless foe ; efficient, militant, 
inventive, with a culture and religion 
suited to its genius, but as ruthless as a 
wolf toward everything in its path. It 
smashed whatever it struck and in the 
course of events Jerusalem was ground 
in its irresistible mill. 



72 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. Ill 

When a "return" was granted under the 
Persians, and the national and religious 
life was restored in Jerusalem, new diffi- 
culties swarmed. During the long period 
of " restoration" the half-breed peoples 
in Palestine with their low ideals threat- 
ened to defeat the hopes of the returned 
exiles and made their feeble beginnings as 
difficult as possible. Then, again, the 
new nation was hardly firm in its re- 
found life when it had to meet the forces 
of Hellenism which rose out of the ex- 
pansion policies of Alexander. A culture 
incompatible with the ideals and passions 
of the Hebrews broke in and surrounded 
them. It was a different enemy to any 
they had yet met but no less irreconcilable. 
Under the Hellenized kings of Antioch 
all the hopes and ideals of this long- 
suffering race were put in jeopardy, and 
the very existence of the chosen nation 
was in desperate peril in the period of 
the Maccabean struggle. 

But through all these centuries of war- 
fare with alien peoples, and during all 



Ch. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 73 

these hard periods of strain and anguish, 
there existed a school of saints who were 
learning how to stand the universe and 
who were teaching the. world a way of 
victory even in the midst of outward 
defeat. Their "way" was the fortifica- 
tion of the soul, the construction of the 
interior life ; and the literature which 
they produced has proved to be one of 
the most precious treasures of the race. 
The gold dust words of these saints are 
scattered through most of the early books 
of Israel, for in all periods the poets of 
this race were mainly busy with this 
central problem of life, the problem of 
standing the universe. But it is in the 
collection which we call the Psalms that 
we find the supreme literature of this 
inner way of fortification and victory. 

"Thou restorest my soul," is the joyous 
testimony of one of these saints, and this 
testimony of the best loved member of 
this school of saints is the key to the 
Psalmist's way of triumph in general. 
In the confusion of events and the irra- 



74 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. Ill 

tionality of things — die Ohnmacht der 
Natur — he felt his way back, like a 
little child in the dark feeling for his 
mother, until he found God as the rock 
on which his feet could stand. The 
processes of reconstruction are never 
traced out. The logic of this way back 
to the fortification of the soul through 
the discovery of God is not given in detail. 
The moments when we shift the levels of 
life are never quite describable. But 
somehow when the way outside goes on 
into the valley of the shadow of death, 
and the table is set in the face of enemies, 
the soul falls back upon God and is re- 
stored. 

"I could not understand,'' another 
Psalmist declares. Everything was baf- 
fling. The wicked seemed to prosper and 
the righteous to suffer. The world ap- 
peared out of joint and the whole web of 
life hopelessly tangled; "but," he adds 
with no further explanation, "I came into 
the sanctuary of God and then I saw." 
It is like the final solution in the great 



Ch. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 75 

inner drama of Job. God answers and 
Job's problem is solved: "I had heard 
of thee by the hearing of the ear, but 
now mine eye seeth thee." In the great 
phrase of the book, "God turned the cap- 
tivity of Job." 

These men who gave us our Psalms 
had learned how to bear adversity and 
affliction without being overwhelmed or 
defeated. "All thy waves and thy billows 
have gone over me," one of them cries. 
He has lost his land and has only the 
memory of Jordan and Hermon and Mizar. 
His adversaries are a constant "sword in 
his bones." They jeer at him and ask, 
"Where now is thy God?" but his trust 
holds steadily on : "The Lord will com- 
mand His loving-kindness in the daytime, 
and in the night His song shall be with 
me!" Even when the water-spouts of 
trouble break over him, when "the waters 
roar and are troubled," when the "na- 
tions rage and kingdoms are moved," 
when "desolations are abroad in the 
earth," God abides for him "a very 



j6 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. Ill 

present help in time of trouble," "a 
refuge and strength" for his soul. Dis- 
may and trembling may be abroad ; 
pain may come as on a woman in travail, 
yet this deep soul can calmly say, "God 
is our God forever; He will be our guide 
even unto death." 

This element of trust and confidence 
has never anywhere had grander utter- 
ance. The Psalmist has got beyond re- 
liance on "horses and chariots," beyond 
trust in "riches," "princes," in "the bow 
or the sword," or in "man, whose breath 
is in his nostrils." He rests his case on 
God alone, and builds on naked faith in 
His goodness and care : " Thou hast de- 
livered my soul from death, mine eyes 
from tears, and my feet from falling." 
Puzzled he often is with the prosperity 
of the wicked, who "flourish like green 
bay-trees"; perplexed he sometimes is 
with God's delay in coming to the help 
of the poor and needy and oppressed; 
but his faith holds on and he does not 
"slide." It gives us almost a sense of 



Ch. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 77 

awe as we see a valiant soul, hard pressed, 
hemmed around, deep in affliction and 
sorrow, " standing the world" and saying 
in clear voice : "Oh, give thanks unto the 
Lord, for He is good ; His loving-kindness 
endureth forever!" 

We understand when we read such words 
why this collection of Psalms has held its 
place in the religious life of the world. 
It contains the living, throbbing expe- 
rience of great souls, who cared absolutely 
for one thing — to find God and to enjoy 
Him, and who, having found their one 
precious jewel, could do without all else, 
and by this inner experience could stand 

the world. 

II 

THE NEW AND LIVING WAY 

The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
declares that Christ has introduced into 
the world "a new and living way" to God. 
The concrete problems confronting this 
writer to a Jewish circle of the first cen- 
tury were very different from our own 
problems to-day, but he so succeeded in 



78 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. Ill 

seizing an eternal aspect of the issue 
that his word about the new and living 
way is as vital now as it was then. 

His "new and living way," as the tenth 
chapter shows, is the way of personal 
consecration as a substitute for the old 
way of sacrifice. The manner of his ex- 
position may seem to us now a little 
artificial, but there can be no question 
of the religious significance of the con- 
clusion. Following his usual line of in- 
terpretation, he begins by treating the 
great national system of sacrifices as a 
"shadow," i.e. a parable, or a figure, or a 
symbol, of a true and higher reality. 
Then he goes on boldly to declare that 
"sacrifices" have become empty perform- 
ances — it is impossible, he says, that the 
blood of bulls and goats works any real 
change in the nature or the attitude of 
the soul. Next he buttresses his radical 
conclusion with a citation of Scripture 
to the effect that God has never taken 
pleasure in burnt offerings and ritual 
sacrifices, and on this Scripture text from 



Ch. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 79 

the Psalms he rises to his new insight, 
that Christ has come not to do the sacri- 
ficial work of a priest, not to satisfy 
God by a sacrifice, but to reveal the 
personal power of a life of consecration : 
"Then said I, lo, I come to do thy will, O 
God." This way of dedication to the 
divine will, this complete consecration of 
self out of love for the will of God, the 
writer calls "the new and living way." 

Two very important conclusions are 
inherently bound up with this transition 
from a religion of sacrifices to a religion of 
dedication. First, it carries a wholly 
new conception of God and secondly, it 
involves a complete reinterpretation of 
human ministry. If God does not take 
any pleasure in sacrifice, then the whole 
idea that He is a Being to be appeased 
by gifts, by offerings, by incense, by 
blood, or by self-inflicted suffering of 
any sort, falls to the ground. These 
things are not shadows or symbols ; they 
are blunders and mistakes. The God for 
whom they are intended needs and asks 



80 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. Ill 

for no such form of approach. That has 
always been the contention of the supreme 
prophets of the race, and Christ in His 
unveiling of God has made the fact sun- 
clear that God is not rightly conceived 
when He is thought of as needing any 
kind of sacrifice or any inducement to 
make Him forgiving or loving. Love is 
His nature. The new and living way 
leads first of all to this new revelation of 
God. 

But no less certainly it leads to a new 
type of minister. The priest was con- 
ceived as an expert in ways of satisfying 
God and of appeasing Him. He was 
supposed to know what God required 
and how to perform the things required. 
He was indispensable, because only an 
expert, duly ordained, could do the work 
that was necessary for bringing God and 
man into relation with each other. Under 
"the new and living way," however, the 
priest has lost his occupation and the 
minister becomes an expert in ways of 
expanding human life and in bringing 



Ch. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 8 1 

men to a dedication of themselves to the 
will of God and to the spiritual tasks of 
the world. In accordance with this new 
insight, everything that concerns religion 
must in some way attach to life. It 
must promote, or advance life, increase 
life, add to its height and depth, or, in 
some manner, make life richer and more 
joyous. The minister of the new and 
living way may be called, as he no doubt 
will be called, to make many sacrifices 
of things that are precious, and surrenders 
of things as dear as life itself, but there 
will be no inherent magic in these sacri- 
fices. They will not be efficacious as a 
satisfaction to God. They will be only 
means toward some larger end of life, 
as was the case with Christ's surrenders 
and sacrifices. The ascetic temper will 
be left forever behind. Whatever is cut 
off, or plucked out, will be removed only 
for the sake of increasing the quality 
of life and the dynamic of it. The final 
test is always to be sought in the expansion 
of capacity, in the increase of talents, in 

G 



82 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. Ill 

the formation of personality, in dedica- 
tion to the task of widening the area of 
life. 

The true minister will, like the great 
apostle, present his body, his entire being, 
in living dedication. He will be satisfied 
with nothing short of a holy and acceptable 
service — acceptable, because Christlike 
— he will endeavor to make all his service 
" reasonable service"; that is, intelligent 
service, and he will strive earnestly not 
to become set into the mold of the world 
or into any deadening groove of habit, 
but to be transformed by a steady in- 
crease of life and a renewing of spiritual 
insight, so that he can prove what is the 
perfect will of God and so that he can 
minister to the growing life of the world. 

Ill 

AN APOSTLE OF THE INNER WAY 

It is always a foolish blunder to take 
half when it is just as easy to have a 
whole, but the tendency to dichotomize 
all realities into halves and to assume 



Ch. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 83 

that we are shut up to an either-or selec- 
tion, is an ancient tendency and one that 
very often keeps us from winning the full 
richness of the life that is possible for us. 
Human history is strewn with dualistic 
formulations which have sorted men into 
eiiher-or groups. Now it is " spirit" and 
" flesh" that are sharply antagonistic 
and men are called upon to settle which 
of these two halves of man's life is to have 
their loyalty. Again, it is "this world" 
and "the next world" — the here and the 
yonder — that bid for our heart's suffrage. 
"The Church" and "the world" ; "faith" 
and "reason"; "the sacred" and "the 
secular" are other twin pairs that call for 
a sharp decision of allegiance. So, too, it 
has been customary to cut apart the 
outer life and the inner life and, with a 
stern eiiher-or, to put them into rivalry 
with one another. One camp insists that 
religion is to be sought in deeds and 
effects ; the other camp asserts that 
religion is an inward condition of life — 
to be is more important than to do. But 



84 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. Ill 

this method of cutting is like that which 
the unnatural mother asked Solomon to 
perform upon the living child. It sunders 
what was alive and throbbing into two 
dead fragments, neither of which is a real 
half of the united living whole. In place 
of all the either-or formulations that force 
a choice between the halves of great 
spiritual realities I should put the living 
and undivided whole. Instead of select- 
ing either-or, I prefer to take both. There 
is no line that splits the outer life and 
the inner life into two compartments. 
Nobody can do without being and nobody- 
can be without doing. Personality is the 
most complete unity in the universe and 
it binds forever into an indissoluble and 
integral whole the outer and the inner, 
the spirit and the deed. 

But at the same time it is interesting 
to see what a supremely great and many- 
sided soul like St. Paul has to say of the 
inwardness and interior depth of religion. 
That he was a man of action is plain 
enough to be seen and nobody can easily 



Ch. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 85 

miss his clarion call to arm cap-a-pie for 
the positive, moral battles of life. He 
was ethical in the noblest sense of the 
word, but there was an inner core of 
religious experience in him which is as 
unique and wonderful as is his athletic 
ethical purpose or his imperial spirit of 
moral conquest. 

There was for him no kind of " doing" 
which could ever be a substitute for the 
spiritual health of the soul. Nobody 
has ever lived who has been more deeply 
concerned than was St. Paul over the 
primary problem of life : How can my 
soul be saved? To be " saved" for him, 
however, does not mean to be rescued 
from dire torment or from the conse- 
quences which follow sin and dog the 
sinner. No transaction in another world 
can accomplish salvation for him ; no 
mere change from debit to credit side 
in the heavenly ledgers can make him a 
saved man. To be saved for St. Paul 
is to become a new kind of person, with 
a new inner nature, a new dimension of 



86 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. Ill 

life, a new joy and triumph of soul. There 
is a certain inner feeling here which sys- 
tematic theology can no more convey 
than a botanical description of a flower 
can convey what the poet feels in the 
presence of the flower itself. There is no 
lack of books and articles which spread 
before us St. Paul's doctrines and which 
tell us his theory — his gnosis — of the 
plan of salvation. The trouble with all 
these external accounts is that they clank 
like hollow armor. They are like sound- 
ing brass and clanging cymbals. We 
miss the real thing that matters — the 
inner throbbing heart of the living ex- 
perience. 

What he is always trying to tell us is 
that a new "nature" has been formed 
within him, a new spirit has come to birth 
in his inmost self. Once he was weak, 
now he is strong. Once he was per- 
manently defeated, now he is "led in a 
continual triumph." Once he was at the 
mercy of the forces of blind instinct and 
habit which dragged him whither he would 



Ch. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 87 

not, now he feels free from the dominion 
of sin and its inherent peril to the soul. 
Once, with all his pride of pharisaism, he 
was an alien to the commonwealth of 
God, now he is a fellow citizen with all 
the inward sense of loyalty that makes 
citizenship real. 

He traces the immense transformation 
to his personal discovery of a mighty 
forgiving love, where he had least ex- 
pected to find it, in the heart of God — 
"We are more than conquerors through 
Him that loved us;" "The life I now 
live, I live by faith in the Son of God 
who loved me and gave Himself for me." 
Faith, wherever St. Paul uses it to ex- 
press the central human fact of the re- 
ligious life, is a word of tremendous 
inward depth. It is bathed and satu- 
rated with personal experience, and it 
proves to be a constructive life-principle 
of the first importance. Faith works; 
it is something by which one lives : "The 
life I now live, I live by faith." 

But the full measure — the length and 



88 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. Ill 

breadth, depth and height — of his new 
inner world does not come full into view 
until one sees how through faith and love 
this man has come into conscious relation 
with the Spirit of God inwardly revealed 
to him, and operative as a resident pres- 
ence in his own spirit. No forensic ac- 
count of salvation can reach this central 
feature of real salvation, which now ap- 
pears as new inward life and power. 
St. Paul takes religion out of the sphere 
of logic into the primary region of life. 
There are ways of living upon the Life of 
God as direct and verifiable as is the 
correspondence between the plant and 
its natural environment. To live, in the 
full spiritual meaning of this word as 
St. Paul uses it, is to be immersed in the 
living currents of the circulating Life of 
God, and to be fed from within by those 
sources of creative Life which feed the 
evolving world: " Beholding as in a 
mirror the glory of the Lord, we are 
transformed into the same image by the 
Spirit of the Lord;" "He hath sent 



Ch. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 89 

forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, 
crying Abba;" "The Spirit bears witness 
with our spirit that we are sons of God." 
With the progress of his experience and 
the maturing of his thought upon it, 
there came to St. Paul an extraordinary- 
insight. He came to identify Christ with 
the Spirit: "The Lord is the Spirit." 
He no longer thought of Him as merely 
the historical person of Galilee, but rather 
as the eternal revelation of God, first in 
a definite form as Jesus the Christ, and 
then, after the resurrection, as Christ the 
invisible Spirit, working within men, re- 
creating and renewing their spiritual lives. 
The influence of Christ for salvation was, 
thus, with him far more than a moral 
influence. It was of the nature of a real 
energism — a spiritual power cooperating 
with the human will and remaking men 
by the formation of a new Christ-natured 
self within him. The process has no 
known or conceivable limits. Its goal 
is the formation of a man "after Christ" : 
"Till Christ be formed in you." "That 



90 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. Ill 

you may grow up into Him in all things 
who is the Head;" "Till we all come 
to the measure of the stature of the ful- 
ness of Christ." The "fruit" of the 
Spirit, matured in the inward realm of 
man's central being and expressed in 
common acts of daily life, is love, joy, 
peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, 
faithfulness, meekness, self-control — a na- 
ture in all things like that which was re- 
vealed in glory and fulness in the face of 

Jesus Christ. 

IV 

THE EPHESIAN GOSPEL 

In his fresh, impressive book, The 
Ephesian Gospel, Dr. Percy Gardner says 
that in the early period of Christianity 
no city, save only Jerusalem, was more 
influential for the development of Chris- 
tian thought than was the city of Ephesus. 
It was here in Ephesus, scholars are con- 
vinced, some time about the end of the 
first century, that the life and message of 
Jesus received its most sublime and won- 
derful interpretation, and it was through 



Ch. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 91 

this Ephesian interpretation that the 
gathered mysticism of Greece and the 
other ancient religions of the world was 
indissolubly fused with the great ethical 
teachings of the Galilean. 

It will never be known, with absolute 
certainty, who was the profound genius 
that made this Ephesian interpretation, 
but it will always continue to be called 
the gospel " according to John." There 
will never be any doubt, in the minds of 
those who read appreciatively, that, either 
inwardly or outwardly, the writer of it 
had "lain on Christ's bosom"; that he 
had "received of His fulness," and that 
he had "seen with his eyes, and heard 
with his ears and handled with his hands 
the Word of Life." He was, we can 
almost certainly say, one of St. Paul's 
men. He has fully grasped the central 
ideas of the apostle who first planted the 
truth in Ephesus, and he carries out in 
powerful fashion the Pauline discovery 
that Christ has become an invisible, eternal 
presence in the world. At the same time 



92 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. Ill 

he possesses, either at first or second hand, 
a large amount of narrative material for 
the expansion of the simple gospel story 
as it had come from the three synoptic 
writers. But from first to last everything 
in this gospel is told for a definite pur- 
pose and every incident is loaded with a 
spiritual, interpretative content and mean- 
ing. He does not undervalue history or 
the details of the Life lived in Judea and 
Galilee, but he is concerned at every point 
to raise men's thoughts to the eternal 
meaning of Christ's coming, to cultivate 
inward fellowship with Him, and to reveal 
the last great beatitude, that those who 
have not seen with outward eyes, but 
nevertheless have believed, are the truly 
blessed ones. 

The earliest of our gospel documents 
— the document now called Q — centers 
upon the " message," and gives us a col- 
lection of simple but bottomlessly pro- 
found sayings of Jesus. Another docu- 
ment — the gospel of Mark — hardly less 
primitive and no less wonderful, focuses 



Ch. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 93 

upon the person of Jesus and His doings. 
Here we have in very narrow compass the 
earliest story of this Life, inexhaustible in 
its depth of love and grace, which has 
ever since woven itself into the very tissue 
of human life and thought. But now this 
final document, which we have been call- 
ing "the Ephesian Gospel," makes a 
unique contribution and carries us up to 
a new level of life. It announces that 
Jesus who gave the message, the Jesus 
who lived this extraordinary personal life 
and did the deeds of love and sacrifice, 
has become an ever-living, environing, 
permeative Spirit, continuing His revela- 
tion, reliving His life, extending His sway 
in men of faith. He is no longer of one 
date and one locality, but is present to 
open, responsive human hearts everywhere 
as the atmosphere is present to breathing 
lungs, or the sea to swimming fish, or the 
sunlight to growing plants. We can no 
more lose this Christ of experience than 
we can lose the sky. 

Christianity is in this interpretation 



94 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. Ill 

vastly more than an historical religion, 
bound up forever with the incidents of 
its temporal origin. It is as much a 
present fact and a present power as elec- 
tricity is. It is rooted in an inexhaustible 
source of Life. It is as dynamic as the 
central springs of the universe, and it is 
perpetually supplied from within by in- 
visible fountains of living energy. But 
this triumphant and eternal principle of 
the spiritual life is, " according to John," 
no vague, abstract principle of logic, but 
instead a warm, tender, intimate, con- 
crete personification of Life, Light, and 
Love who has definitely incarnated the 
Truth and revealed the nature of God and 
the possible glory of man. 

The great Ephesian makes no division 
between history and experience. The 
Christ of his faith and of his account is 
alike the Christ of history and of ex- 
perience. He looks backward, and he 
looks inward, and the Christ of his story 
is the seamless and invisible product of 
this double process. This is wholly in 



Ch. Ill] PROPHETS OF INNER WAY 95 

the manner of the great apostle who de- 
clared "if we have known Christ after the 
flesh we know Him so now no more," 
and yet neither the Ephesian disciple nor 
the apostolic master discounted the im- 
portance of the facts of the Christ after 
the flesh. The transcendent truth for 
them both is the truth that the Church 
still has its Christ, who is leading it into 
all the truth and progressively revealing 
Himself with the expanding ages. 

Every Christian mystic for nineteen 
hundred years has felt the influence of 
this great Ephesian prophet, and his 
message has become a part of the neces- 
sary air we breathe. His gospel and his 
brief epistle, loaded with its message of 
love, are, as Deissmann has well said, 
the greatest monument of the appre- 
ciation of the mystical teaching of St. 
Paul that has ever been reared in the 
world. The man who performed this 
immense literary task for us of the after 
ages now 

"Lies as he lay once, breast to breast with God," 



96 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. Ill 

but his word is still quick and powerful 
and he has helped us more than any other 
writer has done to interpret our own 
experience, and more than any other 
prophet this Ephesian has inspired our 
faith in the real presence and has given 
us the assurance, inwardly verified, that 
we are not comfortless and alone, in a 
world of pain and loss and death, but are 
bound as living twigs in one sap-giving 
Vine of Life, participants of the vitalizing, 
refreshing, joy-bringing bread and water 
of Life, and with open access to the infinite 
healing and comfort and fortification of 
the Eternal Christ. 



CHAPTER IV 
THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 

I 

WAITING ON GOD 

As worship, taken in its highest sense 
and widest scope, is man's loftiest under- 
taking, we cannot too often return to 
the perennial questions : What is wor- 
ship ? Why do we worship ? How do 
we best perform this supreme human 
function ? Worship is too great an ex- 
perience to be defined in any sharp or 
rigid or exclusive fashion. The history 
of religion through the ages reveals the 
fact that there have been multitudinous 
ways of worshiping God, all of them 
yielding real returns of life and joy and 
power to large groups of men. At its 
best and truest, however, worship seems 
to me to be direct, vital, joyous, personal 
h 97 



98 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

experience and practice of the presence of 
God. 

The very fact that such a mighty ex- 
perience as this is possible means that 
there is some inner meeting place between 
the soul and God ; in other words, that 
the divine and human, God and man, 
are not wholly sundered. In an earlier 
time God was conceived as remote and 
transcendent. He dwelt in the citadel of 
the sky, was worshiped with ascending 
incense and communicated His will to 
beings beneath through celestial messen- 
gers or by mysterious oracles. We have 
now more ground than ever before for 
conceiving God as transcendent; that is, 
as above and beyond any revelation of 
Himself, and as more than any finite 
experience can apprehend. But at the 
same time, our experience and our ever- 
growing knowledge of the outer and 
inner universe confirm our faith that 
God is also immanent, a real presence, a 
spiritual reality, immediately to be felt 
and known, a vital, life-giving environ- 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 99 

ment of the soul. He is a Being who can 
pour His life and energy into human 
souls, even as the sun can flood the world 
with light and resident forces, or as the 
sea can send its refreshing tides into all 
the bays and inlets of the coast, or as the 
atmosphere can pour its life-giving sup- 
plies into the fountains of the blood in 
the meeting place of the lungs ; or, better 
still, as the mother fuses her spirit into 
the spirit of her responsive child, and 
lays her mind on him until he believes in 
her belief. 

It will be impossible for some of us 
ever to lose our faith in, our certainty of, 
this vital presence which overarches our 
inner lives as surely as the sky does our 
outer lives. The more we know of the 
great unveiling of God in Christ, the 
more we see that He is a Being who can 
be thus revealed in a personal life that 
is parallel in will with Him and perfectly 
responsive in heart and mind to the 
spiritual presence. We can use as our 
own the inscription on the wall of the 



IOO THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

ancient temple in Egypt. On one of 
the walls a priest of the old religion had 
written for his divinity: "I am He who 
was and is and ever shall be, and my 
veil hath no man lifted." On the op- 
posite wall, some one who had found his 
way into the later, richer faith, wrote 
this inscription: "Veil after veil have 
we lifted and ever the Face is more won- 
derful!" 

It must be held, I think, as Emerson 
so well puts it, that there is "no bar or 
wall in the soul" separating God and man. 
We lie open on one side of our nature to 
God, who is the Oversoul of our souls, 
the Overmind of our minds, the Over- 
person of our personal selves. There are 
deeps in our consciousness which no 
private plumb line of our own can sound ; 
there are heights in our moral conscience 
which no ladder of our human intelligence 
can scale; there are spiritual hungers, 
longings, yearnings, passions, which find 
no explanation in terms of our physical 
inheritance or of our outside world. We 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 101 

touch upon the coasts of a deeper uni- 
verse, not yet explored or mapped, but 
no less real and certain than this one in 
which our mortal senses are at home. 
We cannot explain our normal selves or 
account for the best things we know — 
or even for our condemnation of our 
poorer, lower self — without an appeal 
to and acknowledgment of a divine Guest 
and Companion who is the real presence 
of our central being. How shall we best 
come into conscious fellowship with God 
and turn this environing presence into a 
positive source of inner power, and of 
energy for the practical tasks and duties 
of daily life ? 

It is never easy to tell in plain words 
what prepares the soul for intercourse 
with God ; what it is that produces the 
consciousness of divine tides, the joyous 
certainty that our central life is being 
flooded and bathed by celestial currents. 
No person ever quite understands how 
his tongue utters its loftiest words, how 
his pen writes its noblest phrases, how 



102 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

his clearest insights came to him, how his 
most heroic deeds got done, or how the 
finest strands of his character were woven. 
Here is a mystery which we never quite 
uncover — a background which we never 
wholly explore lies along the fringes of 
the most illumined part of our lives. 
This mystery surrounds all the supreme 
acts of religion. They cannot be reduced 
to a cold and naked rational analysis. 
The intellect possesses no master key 
which unlocks all the secrets of the soul. 

We can say, however, that purity of 
heart is one of the most essential pre- 
conditions for this high-tide experience of 
worship. That means, of course, much 
more than absence of moral impurity, 
freedom from soilure and stain of willful 
sins. It means, besides, a cleansing away 
of prejudice and harsh judgment. It 
means sincerity of soul, a believing, trust- 
ing, loving spirit. It means intensity of 
desire for God, singleness of purpose, 
integrity of heart. The flabby nature, 
the duplex will, the judging spirit, will 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 103 

hardly succeed in worshiping God in 
any great or transforming way. 

Silence is, again, a very important 
condition for the great inner action which 
we call worship. So long as we are con- 
tent to speak our own patois, to live in 
the din of our narrow, private affairs, 
and to tune our minds to stock broker's 
tickers, we shall not arrive at the lofty 
goal of the soul's quest. We shall hear 
the noises of our outer universe and 
nothing more. When we learn how to 
center down into the stillness and quiet, 
to listen with our souls for the whisper- 
ings of Life and Truth, to bring all our 
inner powers into parallelism with the 
set of divine currents, we shall hear tid- 
ings from the inner world at the heart 
and center of which is God. 

But by far the most influential con- 
dition for effective worship is group- 
silence — the waiting, seeking, expectant 
attitude permeating and penetrating a 
gathered company of persons. We hardly 
know in what the group-influence con- 



104 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

sists, or why the presence of others height- 
ens the sensitive, responsive quality in 
each soul, but there can be no doubt of 
the fact. There is some subtle telepathy 
that comes into play in the living silence 
of a congregation which makes every 
earnest seeker more quick to feel the 
presence of God, more acute of inner 
ear, more tender of heart to feel the 
bubbling of the springs of life than any 
one of them would be in isolation. Some- 
how we are able to "lend our minds out," 
as Browning puts it, or at least to con- 
tribute toward the formation of an at- 
mosphere that favors communion and co- 
operation with God. 

If this is so, if each assists all and all in 
turn assist each, our responsibilities in 
meetings for worship are very real and 
very great and we must try to realize 
that there is a form of ministry which 
is dynamic even when the lips are sealed. 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 105 
II 

IN THE SPIRIT 

There has surely been no lack of dis- 
cussion on the Trinity during the cen- 
turies of Christian history ! But in all 
the welter and turmoil of words there 
has been surprisingly little said about the 
Spirit. The nature of the Father and 
the Son has always been the central 
theme, and whatever is said of the Spirit 
is vague and brief. The Creeds are very 
precise in their accounts of God the 
Father and of Christ the Son, but of the 
Spirit, they merely say without explana- 
tion or expansion: "I believe in the 
Holy Spirit." 

The mystics and the heretics have 
generally had more to say of the Spirit. 
They have almost always claimed for 
themselves direct and inward guidance ; 
they have insisted that God is near at 
hand, a presence to be felt, and they have 
endeavored to bring in a "dispensation" 
of the religion of the Spirit. But they, 



106 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

too, have contented themselves with vague 
and hazy accounts of the nature and opera- 
tion of the Spirit. It has largely remained 
a subject of mystery, a kind of " fringe " 
with no definite idea corresponding to the 
word. 

One reason for this haze and vagueness 
is due to the fact that the Spirit has 
generally been supposed to act suddenly, 
miraculously, and "as He lists," so that 
no law or principle or method of His 
operation can be discovered. He has 
been conceived as working upon or 
through the individual in such a way that 
the individual is merely an "instrument," 
receiving and transmitting what comes 
entirely from "beyond" himself. Con- 
sequently to be "in the Spirit" has meant 
to be "out of oneself," i.e. to be a channel 
for something that has had no origin in, 
and no assistance from, our own personal 
consciousness. As Philo, the famous 
Alexandrian teacher of the first century, 
states this view: "Ideas in an invisible 
manner are suddenly showered upon me 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 107 

and implanted in me by an inspiration 
from on high." 

There is no doubt that in some cases 
in all ages men and women have had 
experiences like that of Philo's. But 
they are by no means universal ; they 
are extremely rare and unusual. God 
does sometimes "give to His beloved in 
sleep" and He does apparently sometimes 
open the windows of the soul by sudden 
inrushes of light and power. It is, how- 
ever, a grave mistake to limit the sphere 
and operation of the divine Spirit to these 
sudden, unusual, miraculous incursions. 
It is precisely that mistake — made by 
so many spiritual persons — that has kept 
Christians in general from realizing the 
immense importance of the work of the 
Spirit in everyday religious life. The mis- 
take is, of course, due to our persistent 
tendency to separate the divine from the 
human as two independent "realities," 
and to treat the divine as something 
"away," " above," and " beyond." 

St. Paul, in spite of all his rabbinical 



108 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

training and the dualisms of his age, is 
still the supreme exponent of the genuine, 
as opposed to the false, idea of the Spirit. 
Whether the sermon on the Areopagus as 
given in Acts is an exact report of an 
actual speech, or not, the words, "in 
Him we live and move and are," express 
very well St. Paul's mature conception 
of the all-pervasive immanence of God, 
though they by no means indicate the 
extraordinary richness and boldness of 
his thought. He identifies Christ and 
the Spirit — "the Lord is the Spirit." 1 
The resurrected and glorified Christ, he 
holds, relives, reincarnates Himself, in 
Christian believers. He becomes the spirit 
and life of their lives. He makes through 
them a new body for Himself, a new kind 
of revelation of Himself. They them- 
selves are "letters of Jesus Christ," 
written by the Spirit. He is no longer 
limited to one locality of the world or to 
one epoch of time. He is "present" 
wherever two or three believers meet in 

1 II Corinthians III. 17. 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 109 

loyalty to Him. He is revealed wherever 
any of His faithful followers are working 
in love and devotion to extend the sway 
of His Kingdom. The Church, which for 
St. Paul means always the fellowship of 
believers, living in and through the Spirit, 
is "a growing habitation of God." 

The "sign" of the Spirit's presence is, 
however, no sudden miraculous bestowal 
like an unknown tongue or an extraor- 
dinary gift of healing. It is just a normal 
thing like the manifestation of love. It 
is proved by the increase of fellowship, 
the growth of group-spirit, the spread of 
community-loyalty. When love has come, 
the Spirit is there, and when love comes, 
those who are in its spirit suffer long and 
are kind ; they envy not ; they are not 
provoked ; they do not exalt mistakes ; 
they bear all things, believe all things, 
hope all things, endure all things. Love 
constructs, because it is the inherent 
evidence of the Spirit, living, working, 
operating in the persons who love. 
Through them the incarnation of God is 



no THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

continued in the world, the Spirit of 
Christ finds its organ of expression and 
life, and the Kingdom of God comes on 
earth as it is in heaven. This "body," 
this Church, this community-group of 
loyal believers, is "the completion of 
Him who through all and in all is being 
fulfilled." * 

If this Pauline idea of the. Spirit is the 
true idea — and I believe it is — then we 
are to look for the divine presence, the 
divine guidance, the divine inspiration, 
not so much in sudden extraordinary 
inrushes and miraculous bestowals, as in 
the processes which transform our stub- 
born nature, which make us loyal and 
loving, which bind us into fellowship with 
others, which form in us community- 
spirit and sympathetic cooperation, and 
which make us efficient organs of the 
Christ-life and of the growing Kingdom 
of God. 



1 Ephesians I. 23. 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE in 
III 

THE POWER OF PRAYER 

It seems to me very clear that there is 
a native, elemental homing instinct in 
our souls which turns us to God as natu- 
rally as the flower turns to the sun. Ap- 
parently everybody in intense moments 
of human need reaches out for some great 
source of life and help beyond himself. 
That is one reason why we can pray and 
do pray, however conditions alter. It is 
further clear that persons who pray in 
living faith, in some way unlock reser- 
voirs of energy and release great sources 
of power within their interior depths. 
There is an experimental energy in prayer 
as certainly as there is a force of gravita- 
tion or of electricity. In a recent in- 
vestigation of the value of prayer, nearly 
seventy per cent of the persons questioned 
declared that they felt the presence of a 
higher power while in the act of praying. 
As one of these personal testimonies puts 
it : prayer makes it possible to carry 



112 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

heavy burdens with serenity; it produces 
an atmosphere of spirit which triumphs 
over difficulties. 

It certainly is true that a door opens 
into a larger life and a new dimension 
when the soul flings itself out in real 
prayer, and incomes of power are ex- 
perienced which heighten all capacities 
and which enable the recipient to with- 
stand temptation, endure, trial, and con- 
quer obstacles. But prayer has always 
meant vastly more than that to the saints 
of past ages. It was assuredly to them 
a homing instinct and it was the occasion 
of refreshed and quickened life, but, 
more than that, it meant to them a time 
of intimate personal intercourse and fel- 
lowship with a divine . Companion. It 
was two-sided, and not a solitary and 
one-sided heightening of energy and of 
functions. Nor was that all. To the 
great host of spiritual and triumphant 
souls who are behind us prayer was an 
effective and operative power. It accom- 
plished results and wrought effects be- 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 113 

yond the range of the inner life of the 
person who was praying. It was a way 
of setting vast spiritual currents into cir- 
culation which worked mightily through 
the world and upon the lives of men. 
It was believed to be an operation of 
grace by which the fervent human will 
could influence the course of divine ac- 
tion in the secret channels of the uni- 
verse. 

Is this two-sided and objective view of 
prayer, as real intercourse and as effective 
power, still tenable ? Can men who ac- 
cept the conclusions of science still pray 
in living faith and with real expectation 
of results ? I see no ground against an 
affirmative answer. Science has furnished 
no evidence which compels us to give up 
believing in the reality of a personal 
conscious self which has a certain area of 
power over its own acts and its own 
destiny, and which is capable of inter- 
course, fellowship, friendship, and love 
with other personal selves. Science has 
discovered no method of describing this 



1 1 4 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

spiritual reality, which we call a self, 
nor can it explain what its ultimate na- 
ture is, or how it creatively acts and 
reacts in love and fellowship toward other 
beings like itself. This lies beyond the 
sphere and purview of science. 

Science, again, has furnished no evi- 
dence whatever against the reality of a 
great spiritual universe, at the heart and 
center of which is a living, loving Person 
who is capable of intercourse and fellow- 
ship and friendship and love with finite 
spirits like us. That is also a field into 
which science has no entree ; it is a matter 
which none of her conclusions touch. Her 
business is to tell how natural phenomena 
act and what their unvarying laws are. 
She has nothing to say and can have 
nothing to say about the reality of a 
divine Person in a sphere within or above 
or beyond the phenomenal realm, i.e. 
the realm where things appear in the 
describable terms of space and time and 
causality. 

Real and convincing intimations have 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 115 

broken into our world that there actually 
is a spiritual universe and a divine Per- 
son at the heart and center of it who is 
in living and personal correspondence with 
us. This is the most solid substance, the 
very warp and woof, of Christ's entire 
revelation. The universe is not a mere 
play of forces, nor limited to things we 
see and touch and measure. Above, be- 
yond, within, or rather in a way transcend- 
ing all words of space, there is a Father- 
God who is Love and Life and Light and 
Spirit, and who is as open of access to us 
as the lungs to the air. Nothing in our 
world of space disproves the truth of 
Christ's report. Our hearts tell us that 
it might be true, that it ought to be true, 
that it is true. And if it is true, prayer, 
in all the senses in which I have used it, 
may still be real and still be operative. 

There is no doubt a region where events 
occur under the play of describable forces, 
where consequent follows antecedents and 
where law and causality appear rigid and 
unvarying. In that narrow, limited realm 



Il6 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

of space particles we shall perhaps not 
expect interruptions or interferences. We 
shall rather learn how to adjust to what 
is there, and to respect it as the highest 
will of the deepest nature and wisdom of 
things. But in the realm of personal 
relationships, in all that touches the 
hidden springs of life, in the stress and 
strain of human strivings, in the inter- 
connections of man with man, and group 
with group, in the vital matters by which 
we live or die, in the weaving of personal 
and national issues and destinies, we may 
well throw ourselves unperplexed on God, 
and believe implicitly that what we pray 
for affects the heart of God and influences 
the course and current of this Deeper Life 
that makes the world. 

IV 

THE MYSTERY OF GOODNESS 

We generally use the word " mystery " to 
indicate the dark, baffling, and forbidding 
aspects of our life-experience. The things 
which spoil our peace and mar our har- 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 117 

monies and break our unions are for us 
characteristically mysteries. Pain, suffer- 
ing, and death are the most ancient of 
mysteries, which philosophers and poets 
have always been striving to solve and 
unravel. Evil in all its complicated forms 
and sin in all its hideous varieties con- 
stitute another group of these dark and 
forbidding mysteries, about which the 
race has forever speculated. The prob- 
lem of evil has been the prolific source 
both of mythological stories and of sys- 
tems of philosophy. 

Every war that has swept the world, 
from that of Chedorlaomer to that of 
Europe to-day, has driven this mystery 
of evil into the foreground of conscious- 
ness, wherever the dark trail of ruin and 
devastation and myriad woe has lain, 
or lies, across the lives and hearts of men. 
Now, as always, burning homes, ruined 
business, masses of slain, maimed bodies, 
the welter of animal instincts, the suffer- 
ing of women and little children, and the 
hates enflamed between races form the 



Ii8 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

greatest summation of baffling evils that 
man has known. 

But it is an interesting fact that the 
mysteries referred to by the greatest 
prophets of the soul are not of this dark 
and baffling type. They are mysteries 
of light rather than mysteries of darkness. 
Christ speaks of "the mystery of the 
Kingdom of God." Saint Paul finds the 
central mystery to be an incarnational 
revelation of a suffering, loving God, 
who re-lives His life in us, and the author 
of the Epistle to Timothy announces 
"the great mystery of godliness" l Love 
is put above all mysteries ; the gospel of 
grace is more "unsearchable" than any 
suffering of this present time, and the 
real mystery is to be found rather in 
resurrection than in death: "Behold I 
show you a mystery. We shall not all 
sleep, but we shall all be changed and 
the dead shall be raised." 

1 It is true, no doubt, that the word " mystery" in the 
New Testament is generally used with a technical mean- 
ing. I shall refer later to the true significance of the word, 
but for the moment it is not overstraining it to use it as I 
have done in the text. 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 119 

Science has confirmed this emphasis of 
the spiritual prophets. We come back 
from the greatest books of the present 
time with the same conclusion as this 
of the New Testament that the prime 
mysteries of the world are mysteries of 
goodness and not of evil ; of light and 
not of darkness. We can pretty easily 
understand how there should be "evil" 
in a world that has evolved under the 
two great* biological conditions : (1) Every 
being that survives wins out because he 
is more physically fit than his neighbors 
in the struggle for existence, and (2) there 
is a tendency for all inherited traits to 
persist in offspring. In order to have 
"nature" at all, there must be a heavy 
tinge of redness in tooth and claw. The 
primitive passions must be strong in 
order to insure any beings that can sur- 
vive. And if there is to be inheritance 
of parental traits, then the tendencies 
of bygone ages are bound to persist on, 
even into a world of more highly evolved 
beings, and there will be inherited "relics" 



120 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

of fears, of appetites, of impulses, of in- 
stincts, and of desires, as there are inherited 
" relics" in the physical structure, and 
men will continue to do things which 
would better suit the animal level. And, 
finally, if the world is to be made by evolv- 
ing processes, there will of necessity be 
an overlapping of "high" and "low." 
The world cannot go on without carrying 
its past along with the advancing line, 
so that in the light of the new and better 
that comes, the old and out-passed seems 
"evil" and "bad." 

We can see plainly enough where the 
drive of selfishness came from, where the 
passionate fears and angers and hates 
that mar our world got into the system. 
What is not so clear and plain is how 
we came to be possessed of a driving 
hunger for goodness, how we ever got a 
bent for self-sacrifice, how we derived 
our disposition for love, how we dis- 
covered that it is more blessed to give 
than to receive. The mystery after all 
is the mystery of goodness. The gradual 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 121 

growth of a Kingdom of God, in which 
men live by love and brotherhood, in 
which they give without expecting re- 
turns, in which they decrease that others 
may increase, and in which their joy is 
fulfilled in the spreading of joy — that is, 
after all, the mystery. 

The coming, into this checkerboard 
world, of One who practiced love in all 
the varying issues of life, 

"Who nailed all flesh to the cross 
Till self died out in the love of his kind," 

and who Himself believed, and taught 
others to believe, that His Life was a 
genuine revelation of God and the spirit- 
ual realm of reality — there is a mystery. 
That this Life which was in Him is an 
actual incursion from a higher, inexhaust- 
ible world of Spirit, that we all may par- 
take of it, draw upon it, live in it, and 
have it live in us, so that in some sense 
it becomes true that Christ lives in us 
and we are raised from the dead — that 
is the mystery. 



122 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

This word " mystery" or " mysteries" 
did not, however, stand in the thought of 
the early Christians for something myste- 
rious and inscrutable. It stood rather for 
some unspeakably precious reality which 
could be known only by initiation and 
to the initiate. The " mysteries" of 
Mithra were forever hidden to those on 
the outside; to those who formed the 
inner circle the secret of the real presence 
of the god was as open and clear as the 
sunlight under the sky. So, too, with 
the " mysteries" of the gospel. They 
could not be conveyed by word of wis- 
dom or by proof of logic. Then, and 
always, the love of Christ "passes knowl- 
edge," "the peace of God" overtops 
processes of thought. Love, Grace, Good- 
ness, Godliness, Christlikeness breaking 
forth in men like us, remains a "mystery" 
— a thing not "explainable" in terms of 
empirical causation and not capable of 
being "known" except to those who see 
and taste and touch, because they have 
been "initiated into this Life." We shall 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 123 

no doubt still puzzle over the dark enigmas 
of pain and death, of war and its train 
of woe, but we shall do well to remember 
that there is a greater mystery than 
any of these — the mystery of the suffer- 
ing, yet ever-conquering love of God 
which no one knows except he who is 
immersed in it. 



"as one having authority" 

The word "authority" has shifted its 
meaning many times. We do not mean 
now by it what churchmen of former 
times meant when they used it. Even 
as late as the beginning of the twentieth 
century a great French scholar, Auguste 
Sabatier, wrote an influential book in 
which he contrasted "Religions of Au- 
thority" with "Religions of the Spirit." 
By religions of authority he meant types 
of religion which rest on a dogmatic 
basis and on the super-ordinary power 
of ecclesiastical officials to guarantee the 



124 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

truth. However authoritative a religion 
of that type may once have been, it is 
so no longer, at least with those who have 
caught the intellectual spirit of our age. 

"Authority" is found now for most of 
us where the common people who listened 
to Jesus found it — in the convincing and 
verifying power of the message itself. 
We should not now think for a moment 
of taking our views on astronomy or 
geology or physiology — about the cir- 
culation of the blood, for instance — on 
the "authority" of a priest, assuming 
that his ordination supplied him with 
oracular knowledge on these subjects. 
We want to know rather what the facts 
in any one of these fields compel us to 
conclude, and we go for assistance to 
persons who have trained and disciplined 
their powers of observation and who can 
make us see what they see. Our "au- 
thority" in the last resort to-day is the 
evidence of observable facts and legitimate 
inference from these facts. A religion of 
authority, then, for our generation rests, 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 125 

not on the infallible guarantee of any 
ordained man, or of any miraculously 
equipped church, but on the spiritual 
nature of human life itself and on the 
verifiable relations of the soul with the 
unseen realities of the universe. 

I need hardly say — it is so plain that 
the runner can see it — that the so-called 
Sermon on the Mount is one of the best 
illustrations available of this type of 
authoritative religion. Whatever is de- 
clared as truth in that discourse is true, 
not because a messenger from heaven 
brought it, not because a supernatural 
authority guaranteed it, but because it 
is inherently so, and if any statement 
here obviously conflicted with the facts 
of life and stood confuted by the testi- 
mony of the soul itself, it would in the 
end, in the long run as we say, have to 
go. The whole message, from the beati- 
tude upon the poor-in-spirit to the judg- 
ment test of life in action, as revealed in 
the figure of the two houses, is a message 
which can be verified and tried out as 



126 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

searchingly as can the law of gravitation 
or the theory of luminiferous ether. All 
the results that are here announced are 
results which attach to the essential 
nature of the soul, and the conditions 
of blessedness are as much bound up 
with the nature of things as are the con- 
ditions of physical health for a man, or 
the conditions of literary success for an 
author. 

Any one who has read William James' 
chapter on "Habit" knows how it feels to 
be reading something which verifies it- 
self and which convicts the judgment of 
the reader in almost every sentence. As 
one comes toward the end of the chapter 
he finds these words: " Every smallest 
stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never 
so little scar. The drunken Rip Van 
Winkle excuses himself for every fresh 
dereliction by saying, 'I won't count 
this time ! ' Well ! he may not count it, 
and a kind heaven may not count it; 
but it is being counted none the less, 
Down among the nerve cells and fibers 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 127 

the molecules are counting it, registering 
and storing it up to be used against 
him when the next temptation comes." 
These words have the irresistible drive of 
observable facts behind them. We have 
come upon something which is so because 
it is so. It can no more be juggled with 
or dodged than can the fact of the pre- 
cession of the equinoxes. The calm au- 
thority of that chapter might well be 
the envy of every preacher of the gospel 
and of every writer of articles on religion. 
If either the preacher or the religious 
writer expects to speak to the condition 
of his age, then he must acquire this 
authoritative way of dealing with the 
issues of life, for the other kind of "au- 
thority" has had its day. 

It is interesting to discover that Ter- 
tullian and St. Augustine — two men 
who, almost beyond all others, helped to 
forge this waning type of " authority" 
— came very near risking the whole case 
of religion in their day on the primary 
authority of first-hand experience and 



128 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

the testimony of the soul itself. "I call 
in," Tertullian wrote, "a new testimony; 
yea, one that is better known than all 
literature, more discussed than all doc- 
trine, more public than all publications, 
greater than the whole man — I mean 
all which is man's. Stand forth, O soul, 
. . . and give thy witness ... I want 
thy experience. I demand of thee the 
things thou bringest with thee into man, 
the things thou knowest either from thy- 
self or from thy Author. . . . Whenever 
the soul comes to itself, as out of a sur- 
feit or a sleep or a sickness and attains 
something of its natural soundness, it 
speaks of God." 

Nobody has ever shown more skill and 
subtlety in examining the actual processes 
of the inner life than has Augustine, nor 
has any one more powerfully revealed 
the native hunger of the soul for God, or 
the cooperative working of divine grace 
in the inner region where all the issues 
of life are settled. Take this vivid pas- 
sage, picturing the hesitating will, zig- 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 129 

zagging between the upward pull and the 
tug of the old self just before the last 
great act of decision which led to his 
conversion. 

"Thus was I sick and suffering in mind, 
upbraiding myself more bitterly than 
ever before, twisting and turning in my 
chains in the hope that they would soon 
snap, for they had almost worn too thin 
to hold me. Yet they did still hold me. 
But Thou wast instant with me in the 
inner man, with merciful severity, re- 
doubling the lashes of fear and shame, 
lest I should cease from struggling. . . . 
I kept saying within my heart, 'Let 
it be now, now ! ' — and with the word I 
was on the point of going on to the re- 
solve. I had almost done it, but I had 
not done it; and yet I did not slip back 
to where I was at first, but held my foot- 
ing at a short remove and drew breath. 
And again I tried; I came a little nearer, 
and again a little nearer, and now — now 
— I was in act to grasp and hold it ; but 
still I did not reach it, nor grasp it, nor 



130 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

hold it, . . . for the worse that I knew 
so well had more power over me than the 
better that I knew not, and the absolute 
point of time at which I was to change 
filled me with greater dread the more 
nearly I approached it." 

That is straight out of life. The thing 
which really matters there is not some 
fine-spun dogma or the power of some 
mitered priest, but the answer of the soul, 
the obedience of the will in the presence 
of what is unmistakably divine. "The 
whole work of this life," he once said, 
"is to heal the eye of the heart by which 
we see God." Both these men made great 
contributions to the imperial, authorita- 
tive church and they were foremost archi- 
tects of the immense system of dogma 
under which men lived for long centuries, 
but the religion by which they themselves 
lived was born in their own experience, 
and back of all their secondary authority 
was this primary authority of the soul's 
own testimony. 

What our generation needs above every- 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 131 

thing, if I read its problems rightly, is a 
clearer interpretation of the spiritual capac- 
ities and the unseen compulsions of the 
ordinary human soul ; that is to say, a 
more authoritative and so more compell- 
ing psychological account of the actual 
and potential nature of our own human 
self, with its amazing depths and its in- 
finite relationships. We have had fifteen 
hundred years under the dogma of original 
sin and total depravity; now let us have 
a period of actually facing our own souls 
as they reveal themselves, not to the 
theologian, but to the expert in souls. 
We shall find them mysterious and bad 
enough no doubt, but we shall also find 
that they are strangely linked up with 
that unseen and yet absolutely real Heart 
of all things whom we call God. And our 
generation also needs a more authoritative 
account of Jesus Christ — more authorita- 
tive because more truly and more his- 
torically drawn. We have had centuries 
of the Christ of dogma and even to-day 
the Church is split and sundered by its 



132 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

attempt to maintain dogmatic construc- 
tions about His Person. Was He monophy- 
site ? Was he diphysite ? Those dead 
questions have divided the world in former 
ages and still rally oriental sects. Our 
problem is different. We want to see 
how He lived. We want to discover 
what He said. We want to feel the 
power of His attractive personality. We 
want to find out what His own experience 
was and what bearing it has on life to-day. 
We need to have Him reinterpreted to 
us in terms of life, so that once again He 
becomes for us as real and as dynamic 
as He was for Paul in Corinth or for 
John in Ephesus. The moment anybody 
succeeds in doing that, He proves to be as 
much alive as ever, and religion becomes 
as authoritative as ever. Theology is not 
extinct, but it is becoming wholly trans- 
formed and the theology of the coming 
time will be a knowledge of God builded 
not on abstract logic, but on a penetrating 
psychology of man's inner nature and a 
no less penetrating interpretation of his- 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 133 

tory and biography, especially at the 
points where the revelation of God has 
most evidently shone forth and broken 
in upon us. 

VI 

SEEING HIM WHO IS INVISIBLE 

The power "to see the invisible" is as 
essential in science, in philosophy, in art, 
and in common life as it is in religion. 
The world with which science deals is 
not made out of "things that do appear." 
Every step in the advance of science has 
been made by the discovery of invisible 
things which explain the crude visible 
things of our uncritical experience. We 
seldom see any of the things the scientists 
talk about — atoms and molecules and 
cells, laws and causes and energies. These 
things have been found first, not with 
the eyes of sense, but with the vision of 
the mind. 

Newton found the support that holds 
the earth to the sun and the moon to the 
earth, but there was no visible cable, no 



134 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

mighty grooves in which the poles of the 
earth's axis spin. There was nothing to 
see, and yet his mind discovered an in- 
visible link that fastens every particle of 
matter in the universe to every other 
particle, however remote. One fact after 
another has forced the scientist to-day to 
draw upon an invisible world of ether for 
his explanations of a vast number of the 
things that appear. Gravitation, elec- 
trical phenomena, light and color vision, 
and, perhaps, the very origin of matter, 
are due, his mind sees, to the presence of 
this extraordinary world within, or be- 
hind, the world we see. 

One of the greatest advances that has 
ever been made in the progress of medicine 
was made through the discovery of in- 
visible microbes as the cause of contagious 
and infectious diseases. The ancients had 
also believed the cause of many diseases 
to be the presence of invisible agents, 
which they called "demons," but they 
could hit upon no way of finding the 
"demons" or of banishing them. The 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 135 

scientific physician "sees" the invisible 
microbe and he "sees" what will put this 
enemy hors de combat. 

The study of philosophy is chiefly the 
cultivation of the power to see the in- 
visible. Pythagoras is said to have re- 
quired a period of a year of silence as an 
initiation into the business of philosophy 
— because there was nothing to talk about 
until the beginner had learned how to see 
the invisible ! The great realities to which 
the philosopher is dedicated are not things 
to be found, even with microscopes or 
telescopes. Nobody is qualified to enter 
the philosophical race at all — even for 
the hundred-yard dash — unless in the 
temporal he can see the eternal, and in 
the visible the invisible, and in the ma- 
terial the spiritual. There can be no 
artistic creation until some one comes who 
has "the faculty divine" to see 

"The gleam, 
The light that never was, on sea or land." 

Such artistic creations must not be unreal. 



136 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. IV 

On the contrary, they must be more real 
than the scenes we photograph or the 
factual events we describe. They must 
present to us something that is in all 
respects as it ought to be. The artist, the 
poet, the musician succeed in making 
some object, or some character, or some 
series of events or sounds raise us above 
our usual restraints of space and time and 
imperfection and for a moment give us a 
glimpse of something eternal. 

But we see the invisible in our common 
daily life much more than we realize. 
The simple cobbler of shoes stitches and 
pegs at his little shoe, and makes it as 
honestly as he can, for some child whom he 
has never seen and perhaps never will see. 
The merchant expands his business be- 
cause he forecasts the expanding need for 
his articles in China, Africa, or South 
America. The statesman at every move 
is dealing as much with the country of 
his inner vision as with the country his 
eyes see. So, too, is the parent as he 
plans for the discipline and education of 



Ch. IV] THE WAY OF EXPERIENCE 137 

his child. No one can be a good person 
— however simple, or however great — 
without leaving the things that are behind, 
i.e. the things that are actual, and going 
on to realize what is not yet apprehended, 
what exists only in forecast and vision. 
Religion, then, is not alone in demand- 
ing the supreme faculty of seeing the 
invisible. We live on all life-levels by 
faith, by assent to realities which are not 
there for our eyes. Religion only demands 
of us that we see the whole Reality which 
this visible fragment of nature implies, 
that we see the larger spirit which our 
own human spirits call for, that we see 
the eternal significance revealed in the 
life of Christ and in the conquests of His 
spirit through the ages. 



CHAPTER V 

A FUNDAMENTAL SPIRITUAL 
OUTLOOK 

The most important constructive work 
just now laid upon us is the serious task 
of helping to restore faith in the actual 
reality of God and in the fundamental 
spiritual nature of our world. There is 
no substitute for the transforming power 
and inward depth which an irresistible 
first-hand conviction of God gives a man. 
Carlyle, in his usual vivid fashion, says 
that one man with faith in God is 
"stronger, not than ten men that have 
it not, or than ten thousand, but than all 
men that have it not!" A man can face 
anything when he knows absolutely that 
at bottom the universe is not force nor 
mechanism but intelligent and loving pur- 
pose, and that through the seeming con- 
138 



Ch. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 139 

fusion and welter there is a loving, throb- 
bing, personal Heart answering back to us. 
The cultivation of this experience is the 
greatest prophetic mission laid upon the 
spiritual leaders of any age. Isaiah is at 
his fullest stature when in a fearful crisis 
he calls his nation from a military alli- 
ance with Egypt, whose people, he says, 
are "men and not God and whose horses 
are flesh and not spirit," to a reliance on 
God and on eternal resources : "In return- 
ing and rest shall ye be saved ; in quietness 
and confidence shall be your strength." 
George Fox is most clearly a prophet 
when he reports his own experience of 
God: "I saw that there was an ocean of 
darkness and death, but that an infinite 
ocean of light and love flowed over the 
ocean of darkness. In that I saw the in- 
finite love of God." 

If we are to assist in the creation of a 
higher civilization than that against which 
the hand on the wall is writing "mene," 
we must speak of God in the present 
tense, we must live by truths and convic- 



140 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. V 

tions that are grounded in our own ex- 
perience, and we must endeavor to find a 
spiritual basis underlying all the processes 
of the world. Men have been living for a 
generation — or at least trying to live — 
on a naturalistic interpretation of the uni- 
verse which chokes and stifles the higher 
spiritual life of man. We must help those 
who have been caught in this drift of 
materialism to find their way back to the 
spiritual meaning of the world. 

We get a vivid impression of the stern 
and iron character of this materialistic 
universe from the writings of Bertrand 
Russell. Here are two extracts : 



"Man is the product of causes which had no 
prevision of the end they were achieving; his 
origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves 
and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental 
collocations of atoms; no fire, no heroism, no in- 
tensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an 
individual life beyond the grave; all the labours 
of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all 
the noonday brightness of human genius, are 
destined to extinction in the vast death of the 



Ch. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 141 

solar system, and the whole temple of man's achieve- 
ment must inevitably be buried beneath the debris 
of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not 
quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, 
that no philosophy which rejects them can hope 
to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these 
truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding 
despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be 
safely built." * 

"Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and 
all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and 
dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruc- 
tion, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; 
for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to- 
morrow himself to pass through the gate of dark- 
ness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow 
falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little 
day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of 
Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands 
have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, 
to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny 
that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the 
irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his 
knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a 
weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own 
ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march 
of unconscious power." 2 

1 Bertrand Russell's Philosophical Essays, pp. 60, 61. 

2 Ibid., p. 70. 



142 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. V 

Much of the present confusion has been 
due to a false interpretation of the doc- 
trine of evolution. It has been assumed 
— not indeed by scientists of the first 
rank, but by a host of influential inter- 
preters — that the basis of evolution, the 
law which runs the cosmic train, is com- 
petitive struggle for existence, that is to 
say the natural selection of the fittest to 
survive, and the fittest on this count are 
of course the physically fittest, the most 
efficient. This principle, used first to 
explain biological development, has been 
taken up and expanded and used to ex- 
plain all ethical and social progress. Any 
nation that has won out and prevailed 
has done so, on this theory, because it 
made itself stronger than those nations 
with which it competed. This theory has 
contributed immensely toward bringing on 
the catastrophe in Europe. It is a breeder 
of racial rivalries, it is loaded with emo- 
tional stress, it cultivates fear, one of the 
main causes of war, and it runs on all fours 
with materialism. 



Ch. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 143 

But it does not fit the facts of life and 
it is as much a mental construction and as 
untrue to the complete nature of things 
as were the popular pre-evolution theories. 
Here, as everywhere else, the truth is the 
only adequate remedy, and the truth would 
set men free. Biologists of the most 
eminent rank have all along been insist- 
ing that life has not evolved through the 
operation of one single factor ; for example, 
the law of competing struggle. Every- 
where in the process, from lowest to 
highest, there has been present the opera- 
tion of another force as primary as the 
egoistic factor, namely the operation of 
mutual aid, cooperation, struggle for the 
life of others, mother-traits and father- 
traits, sacrifice of self for the group, a 
love-factor implicit at the bottom but 
gloriously conscious and consecrated at the 
top. Nature has always been forerunning 
and crying in the wilderness that the way 
of love will work. 

It is impossible to account for a con- 
tinuously progressive evolution on any 



144 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. V 

mechanical basis. As soon as life ap- 
peared there came into play some degree 
of spontaneity, something unpredictable; 
something which is not mechanism. The 
future in any life-series is never an equa- 
tion with the past. What has been, does 
not quite determine what will be. Life 
carries in itself a creative tendency — a 
tendency to exhibit surprises, novelties, 
variations, mutations, unpredictable leaps. 
We can name this tendency, this upward- 
changing drive, "vital impulse," but how- 
ever we name it, we cannot explain it. 
The variation which raises the entire 
level of life is as mysterious as a virgin 
birth, or a resurrection from the dead. 
There is no help in the word "fortuitous," 
or "accidental," there is no answer when 
the appeal is made either to heredity or to 
physical environment. There is in favor- 
able mutations a revelation of some kind 
of intelligent push, a power of life work- 
ing toward an end. The end or goal of 
the process seems to be an operative 
factor in the process. Evolution seems to 



Ch. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 145 

be due to a mighty living, conscious, 
spiritual driving force, that is pouring 
itself forth in ever-heightening ways of 
manifestation and that differentiates itself 
into myriad varieties of form and activity, 
each one with its own peculiar potency of 
advance. Consciousness, in Henri Berg- 
son's illuminating interpretation of evolu- 
tion, is the original creative cosmic force. 
It is before matter, and its onward destiny 
is not bound up with matter. Wherever 
it appears there is vital impulse, upward- 
pointing mutations, free action, and po- 
tency. But no life is isolated or cut 
apart. Each particular manifestation of 
life is one of the rills into which the im- 
mense river of consciousness divides, and 
this irresistible river with its onward leaps 
seems able to beat down every resistance 
and clear away the most formidable ob- 
stacles — perhaps even death itself. 

But it is not merely in the evolutionary 
process that we need to reinterpret the 
spiritual factor; it is urgently called for 
in our dealing with the whole of nature. 



146 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. V 

We must learn how to interpret the 
fundamental spiritual implications in- 
volved in the nature of beauty, of moral 
goodness, of verifiable knowledge, and of 
personality itself. 

In an impressive way Arthur Balfour 
in his Theism and Humanism has pointed 
out that it is impossible to find any ade- 
quate rational basis for our experience of 
beauty, or for our pursuit of moral ends of 
goodness, or for our confidence in the 
validity of knowledge or truth, unless we 
assume the reality of an underlying spiritual 
universe as the root and ground both of 
nature without us and of mind within us. 
"^Esthetic values," Balfour says, "are in 
part dependent upon a spiritual concep- 
tion of the world in which we live." l 
"Ethics," again he says, "must have 
its roots in the divine; and in the divine 
it must find its consummation" 2 and, 
finally, he says that if rational values are 
to remain undimmed and unimpaired, 

1 Arthur Balfour's Theism and Humanism, p. 87. 

2 Ibid., p. 134. 



Ch. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 147 

God must be treated as real — "He is 
Himself the condition of scientific knowl- 
edge. M1 — "We must hold that reason 
and the works of reason have their source 
in God : that from Him they draw their 
inspiration, and that if they repudiate 
their origin, by this very act they proclaim 
their own insufficiency." 2 

Personality carries in all its larger as- 
pects inevitable implications of a spiritual 
universe. In the first place, it is forever 
utterly impossible to find a materialistic 
or naturalistic origin for personality. 
Whenever we deal with "matter" or 
with "nature," consciousness is always 
presupposed, and the "matter" we talk 
about, or the "nature" we talk about, 
is "matter" or "nature" as existing for 
consciousness or as conceived by con- 
sciousness. It is impossible to get any 
world at all without a uniting, connect- 
ing principle of consciousness which binds 
fact to fact, item to item, event to event, 
into a whole which is known to us through 

1 Ibid., p. 273. 2 Ibid., p. 274. 



148 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. V 

the action of our organizing consciousness. 
Since it is through consciousness that a 
connected universe of experience is pos- 
sible it seems absurd to suppose that 
consciousness is a product of matter or 
of any natural, mechanical process. Every 
effort to find a genesis of knowledge in any 
other source than spirit, derived in turn 
from self-existing Spirit, has always failed 
and from the logical nature of the case 
must fail. There is no answer to the 
question, how did we begin to be persons ? 
which does not refer the genesis to an 
eternal spiritual Principle in the universe, 
transcending space and time, life and 
death, matter and motion, cause and 
effect — a Principle which itself is the 
condition of temporal beginnings and 
temporal changes or ends. 

Normal human experience is, too, heavily 
loaded with further inevitable implications 
of an environing spiritual world. The 
consciousness of finiteness with which we 
are haunted presupposes something infinite 
already in consciousness, just as our knowl- 



Ch. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 149 

edge of "spaces" presupposes space , of 
which definite spaces are determinate 
parts. That we are oppressed with our 
own littleness, that we revolt from our 
meannesses, that we "look before and 
after, and sigh for what is not," that we 
are never satisfied with any achievement, 
that each attainment inaugurates a new 
drive, that we feel "the glory of the im- 
perfect," means that in some way we par- 
take of an infinite revealed in us by an 
inherent necessity of self-consciousness. 
We are made for something which does 
not yet appear, we are inalienably kin to 
the perfect that always draws and attracts 
us. We are forever seeking God because, 
in some sense, however fragmentary, we 
have found Him. 

"Here sits he shaping wings to fly; 
His heart forbodes a mystery : 
He names the name Eternity. 

"That type of Perfect in his mind 
In Nature can he nowhere find. 
He sows himself on every wind. 



150 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. V 

"He seems to hear a heavenly Friend, 
And through thick veils to apprehend 
A labor working to an end." * 

The most august thing in us is that 
creative center of our being, that autono- 
mous citadel of personality, where we form 
for ourselves ideals of beauty, of truth, 
and of goodness by which we live. This 
power to extend life in ideal fashion is 
the elemental moral fact of personal life. 
These ideals which shape our life are 
manifestly things which cannot be "found" 
anywhere in our world of sense experience. 
They are not on land or sea. We live, 
and, when the call for it comes, we joy- 
ously die for things which our eyes have 
never seen in this world of molecular cur- 
rents, for things which are not here in the 
world of space, but which are not on that 
account any less real. We create, by 
some higher drive of spirit, visions of a 
world that ought to be and these visions 
make us forever dissatisfied with the world 
that is y and it is through these visions that 

1 Tennyson's Two Voices. 



Ch. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 151 

we reshape and reconstruct the world 
which is being made. The elemental 
spiritual core in us which we call con- 
science can have come from nowhere but 
from a deeper spiritual universe with 
which we have relations. It cannot be 
traced to any physical origin. It cannot 
be reduced to any biological function. It 
cannot be explained in utilitarian terms. 
It is an august and authoritative loyalty 
of soul to a Good that transcends all 
goods and which will not allow us to 
substitute prudence for intrinsic goodness. 
This inner imperative overarches our moral 
life, and it rationally presupposes a spirit- 
ual universe with which we are allied. 

There is, too, an immense interior depth 
to our human personality. Only the sur- 
face of our inner self is lighted up and is 
brought into clear focal consciousness. 
There are, however, dim depths under- 
lying every moment of consciousness and 
these subterranean deeps are all the time 
shaping or determining the ideas, emotions, 
and decisions which surge up into the 



152 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. V 

illuminated apex of consciousness. This 
submerged life is in part, no doubt, the 
slow deposit of previous experiences, the 
gathered wisdom of the social group in 
which we are imbedded, the residual 
savings from unuttered hopes and wishes, 
aspirations and intentions, 

"All I could never be, 
All, men ignored in me." 

But at times our interior deep seems to 
be more than a deposit of the past. In- 
cursions from beyond our own margin 
seem to occur. Inrushes from a wider 
spiritual world seem to take place. Vital- 
izing, energizing, constructive forces come 
from somewhere into men, as though 
another universe impinged upon our finite 
spirits. We cannot prove by these some- 
what rare and unusual mystical openings 
that there is an actual spiritual environ- 
ment surrounding our souls, but there are 
certainly experiences which are best ex- 
plained on that hypothesis, and there is 
no good reason for drawing any impervious 



Ch. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 153 

boundary around the margins of the 
spiritual self within us. 

All attempts to reduce man's inner 
spiritual life to the play of molecular 
forces have fallen through. Correlation 
between mind and brain cortex there 
certainly is and spirit, as we know it, 
expresses itself under, or in relation to, 
certain physical conditions. But it is im- 
possible to establish a complete parallel- 
ism between mind-functions and brain- 
functions. The psychical, that is to say 
spirit, seems immensely to outrun its 
organ and to use brain as a musician uses 
an instrument. 

The psychological studies of Henri Berg- 
son in France and of Dr. William McDou- 
gall at Oxford make a very strong argu- 
ment for the view that the higher forms 
of consciousness cannot be explained in 
terms of brain action and that there is 
no well-defined physical correlate to the 
highest and most central psychical pro- 
cesses. I shall follow in the main the 
positions of my old teacher, Dr. Mc- 



154 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. V 

Dougall, as worked out in his Body and 
Mind. 

One of the most important differences 
between human and animal consciousness 
comes to light in the appearance of "mean- 
ing" which is a differentiating character- 
istic of personal consciousness. We pass 
"a great divide" when we pass from bare 
sensory experience, common to all higher 
animals, to consciousness of "meaning" 
which is a trait common only to persons. 
We all know what it is to hear words 
which make a clear impression and which 
yet arouse no " meaning." We often 
gaze at objects and yet, like Macbeth, 
have "no speculation in our eyes" — we 
apprehend no significant "meaning" in the 
thing upon which we are looking. We 
sometimes catch ourselves in the very 
act of passing from mere sense or bare 
image to the higher level of "meaning." 
While we gaze or while we listen we sud- 
denly feel the "meaning" flood in and 
transform the whole content of conscious- 
ness. All the higher ranges of experience 



Ch. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 155 

depend on this unique feature which is 
something over and above the mere sen- 
sory stage. The words, "the quality of 
mercy is not strain'd" remain just word- 
sounds until in a flash one sees that mercy 
is "not something that comes out grudg- 
ingly in drops," and then the mind rises 
to "a consciousness of meaning." 1 In 
this higher experience, "meaning" stands 
vividly in the focus of consciousness and, 
in a case, for instance, of grasping a long 
sentence, or of appreciating a piece of 
music, consciousness of "meaning" is an 
integral unitary whole. Now there is no 
corresponding unitary whole in the brain 
which could stand as the physical corre- 
late to this consciousness of "meaning." 
The simple sensational experiences corre- 
spond in some way to parallel brain pro- 
cesses but these elemental experiences are 
merely cues which evoke higher forms of 
psychical "meaning," that have no physical 
or mechanical correlate in the brain. 
This is still more strikingly the case in 

1 Titchener's Beginner's Psychology, p. 19. 



156 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. V 

the higher forms of memory. The lower 
and more mechanical forms of memory 
may be treated as a habit-sequence, linked 
up with permanent brain paths. But 
memory proper depends, as does "mean- 
ing," upon a single act of mental appre- 
hension. As McDougall well says: "the 
whole process and effect, the apprehension 
and the retention and the remembering, 
are absolutely unique and distinct from 
all other apprehensions and retentions 
and rememberings." * The higher kind of 
memory involves "meaning" and, the 
moment "meaning" floods in, vast and 
complicated wholes of experience tend to 
become a permanent possession, while 
only with multitudinous repetitions can 
we fix and keep processes that are mean- 
ingless and without psychical significance. 
But here once more this higher unitary 
consciousness of a remembered whole of 
experience has no assignable physical cor- 
relate in the brain-processes. Certain sen- 
sory cues evoke or recall a synthetic whole 

1 Dr. William McDougall's Body and Mind, p. 335. 



Ch. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 157 

of consciousness which has no parallel in 
the material world. 

Still more obviously in the higher aes- 
thetic sentiments and volitional processes 
is there a spiritual activity which tran- 
scends the mechanical and physical order. 
^Esthetic joy depends upon a spiritual 
power to combine many elements of ex- 
perience to form an object of a higher 
order than any object given to sense. 
It is particularly true of the highest aes- 
thetic joy, for example, enjoyment of poetic 
creations where the ideal and intellectual 
element vastly overtops the sensuous, and 
where the words and imagery really carry 
the reader on into another world than the 
one of sight and sound. Here in a very 
high degree we attain a unified whole of 
consciousness that has no physical corre- 
late among the brain-processes. It is 
further apparent that the higher forms of 
pleasure somehow exert an effective in- 
fluence upon the physical system itself as 
though some new and heightening energy 
poured back from consciousness into the 



158 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. V 

cerebral processes and drained down 
through the system. William James has 
given a very successful account of the way 
in which pleasure and pain as spiritual en- 
ergies reinforce or damp the physical activi- 
ties, so that the personal soul seems to take 
a unique part from within in determining 
the physical process. Here are his words : 

"Tremendous as the part is which pleasure and 
pain play in our psychic life, we must confess that 
absolutely nothing is known of their cerebral con- 
ditions. It is hard to imagine them as having 
special centres; it is harder still to invent peculiar 
forms of process in each and every centre, to which 
these feelings may be due. And let one try as one 
will to represent the cerebral activity in exclusively 
mechanical terms, I, for one, find it quite impossible 
to enumerate what seem to be the facts and yet 
to make no mention of the psychic side which they 
possess. However it be with other drainage cur- 
rents and discharges, the drainage currents and 
discharges of the brain are not purely physical 
facts. They are psycho-physical facts, and the 
spiritual quality of them seems a codeterminant 
of their mechanical effectiveness. If the mechanical 
activities in a cell, as they increase, give pleasure, 
they seem to increase all the more rapidly for that 



Ch. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 159 

fact ; if they give displeasure, the displeasure seems 
to damp the activities. The psychic side of the phe- 
nomenon thus seems somewhat like the applause or 
hissing atja spectacle, to be an encouraging or adverse 
comment on what the machinery brings forth." * 

The unifying effect and the dynamic 
quality of a persistent resolution of will 
is another case in point which seems to 
show that the psychical reality in us vastly 
overtops the mechanism through which it 
works. A fixed purpose, a moral ideal, a 
determined intention, work far-reaching 
results and in some way organize and re- 
inforce the entire nervous mechanism. 
The whole phenomenon of attention which 
has a primary importance for decisions 
of will and immense bearing on the prob- 
lem of freedom of will is something which 
cannot be worked out in brain-terms. 
There seems to be some unifying central 
psychical core within us that raises us 
out of the level of mechanism and makes 
us autonomous creative beings. Once 
more I quote William James, whom many 

1 William James' Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, p. 
583. 



160 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. V 

of us of this generation revere both as 
teacher and friend : 

"It often takes effort to keep the mind upon an 
object. We feel that we can make more or less of 
effort as we choose. If this feeling be not de- 
ceptive, if our effort be a spiritual force, and an 
indeterminate one, then of course it contributes 
coequally with the cerebral conditions to the result. 
Though it introduce no new idea, it will deepen and 
prolong the stay in consciousness of innumerable 
ideas which else would fade more quickly away. 
The delay thus gained might not be more than a 
second in duration — but that second may be 
critical; for in the constant rising and falling of 
considerations in the mind, where two associated 
systems of them are nearly in equilibrium it is 
often a matter of but a second more or less of atten- 
tion at the outset, whether one system shall gain 
force to occupy the field and develop itself, and 
exclude the other, or be excluded itself by the 
other. When developed, it may make us act; 
and that act may seal our doom. The whole 
drama of the voluntary life hinges on the amount 
of attention, slightly more or slightly less, which 
rival motor ideas receive. But the whole feeling 
of reality, the whole sting and excitement of our 
voluntary life, depends on our sense that in it 
things are really being decided from one moment to 



Ch. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 161 

another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a 
chain that was forged innumerable ages ago. This 
appearance, which makes life and history tingle 
with such a tragic zest, may not be an illusion. 
Effort may be an original force and not a mere 
effect, and it may be indeterminate in amount/' * 

There are thus a number of modes of 
consciousness, and I have mentioned only 
a few of them, which have no traceable 
counterpart in the physical sphere, and 
which presuppose a spiritual reality at the 
center of our personal life, and this spirit- 
ual reality, as we have seen, can trace its 
origin only to a self-existing, self-explana- 
tory, environing consciousness, sufficiently 
personal to be the source of our developing 
personality. If this view is correct and 
sound, there is no scientific argument 
against the continuation of life after 
death. If personality is fundamentally a 
spiritual affair and the body is only a 
medium and organ here in space and time of 
a psychical reality, there are good grounds 
and solid hopes of permanent conservation. 

1 James' Psychology (Briefer Course), p. 237. 



l62 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. V 

But after all the supreme evidence that 
the universe is fundamentally spiritual is 
found in the revelation of personal life 
where it has appeared at its highest and 
best in history, that is in Jesus Christ. 
In Him we have a master manifestation 
of that creative upward tendency of life, 
a surprising mutation, which in a unique 
way brought into history an unpredictable 
inrush of life's higher forces. The central 
fact which concerns us here is that He 
is the revealing organ of a new and higher 
order of life. We cannot appropriate the 
gospel by reducing it to a doctrine, nor 
by crystallizing it into an institution, nor 
by postponing its prophesies of moral 
achievement to some remote world beyond 
the stars. We can appropriate it only 
when we realize that this Christ is a 
revelation here in time and mutability of 
the eternal nature and character of that 
conscious personal Spirit that environs 
all life and that steers the entire system 
of things, and that He has come to bring 
us all into an abundant life like His own. 



Ch. V] A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK 163 

Here in Him the love-principle which was 
heralded all through the long, slow process 
has come into full sight and into full 
operation as the way of life. He shows 
us the meaning and possibility of genuine 
spiritual life. He makes us sure that His 
kind of life is divine, and that in His 
face we are seeing the heart and mind 
and will of God. Here at least is one 
place in our mysterious world where love 
breaks through — the love that will not 
let go, the love that suffers long and is 
kind. He makes the eternal Father's 
love visible and vocal in a life near enough 
to our own to move us with its appeal 
and enough beyond us to be forever our 
spiritual goal. We have here revealed a 
divine-human life which we can even now 
in some measure live and in which we can 
find our peace and joy, and through which 
we can so enter into relation with God that 
life becomes a radiant thing, as it was with 
Him, and death becomes, as with Him, a 
way of going to the Father. 



CHAPTER VI 

WHAT DOES RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
TELL US ABOUT GOD 

" A noiseless, patient spider, 

I mark'd, where, on a little promontory, it stood, 

isolated ; 
Mark'd how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding, 
It launch* d forth filament, filament, filament, out of 

itself; 
Ever unreeling them — ever tirelessly speeding them. 

" And you, O my Soul, where you stand, 
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of 

space, 
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, — seeking 

the spheres, to connect them ; 
Till the bridge you will need, be form'd — till the 

ductile anchor hold ; 
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, 

O my soul/' _ Walt Whitman. 

There are many forms of experience 
which in the primary, unanalyzed, unre- 
flective stage appear to bring us into 
164 



Ch. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 165 

immediate contact with self-transcending 
reality. We seem to be nearer the heart 
of things, more imbedded in life and in 
reality itself when consciousness is fused 
and unified in an undifferentiated whole of 
experience than in the later stage of re- 
flection and description. This later stage 
necessarily involves reduction because it 
involves abstraction. We cannot bring 
any object or any experience to exact 
description without stripping it of its 
life and its mystery and without reducing 
it to the abstract qualities which are un- 
varying and repeatable. 

There can be no doubt that our ex- 
periences of beauty, for instance, have a 
physical and describable aspect. The sun- 
set which thrills us is for descriptive pur- 
poses an aggregation of minute water- 
drops which set ether waves vibrating at 
different velocities, and, as a result, we 
receive certain nerve shocks that are 
pleasurable. These nerve shocks modify 
brain cells and affect arterial and visceral 
vibrations, all of which might conceivably 



r66 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. VI 

be accurately described. But no complete 
account of these minute cloud particles, 
or of these ether vibrations ; no catalogue 
of these nerve shocks, cell changes, or 
arterial throbs can catch or present to us 
what we get in the naive and palpitating 
experience of beauty itself. Something 
there in the field of perception has sud- 
denly fused our consciousness into an 
undifferentiated whole in which sensuous 
elements, intellectual and ideal elements, 
emotional and conative elements are 
indissolubly merged into a vital system 
which baffles all analysis. Something got 
through perception puts all the powers of 
the inner self into play and into harmony, 
overcomes all dualisms of self and other, 
annuls all contradictions that may later 
be discovered, lifts the mind to the appre- 
hension of objects of a higher order than 
that of sense, and liberates and vitalizes 
the soul with a consciousness of possession 
and joy and freedom. 

The flower of the botanist is an aggrega- 
tion of ovary, calyx, petals, pistil, and 



Ch. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 167 

pollen — a thing which can be exactly- 
analyzed and described. The poet's 
flower, on the other hand, is never a 
flower which could be pressed in a book 
or dried in an herbarium. It is a tiny- 
finite object which suddenly opens a 
glimpse into a world which mere sense- 
eyes never see. It gives " thoughts that 
do lie too deep for tears." It is something 
so bound in with the whole of things that 
if one understood it altogether, he would 
know "what God and man is." 

These experiences, even if they do not 
prove that there is a world of a higher 
order than that of mechanism and causal 
systems, at least bring the recipient 
moments of relief when he no longer 
cares for proof and they enable him to 
feel that he has authentic tidings of a 
world which is as it ought to be. 

Our world of " inner experience" can in 
a similar way be dealt with by either one 
of these two characteristically different 
methods of approach. We can say, if we 
wish to do so, as Professor Leuba does in 



168 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. VI 

his Psychology of Religion, that "inner 
experience belongs entirely to psychology/' 
"the conscious life belongs entirely to 
science/' 1 "we must deal with inner 
experience according to the best scientific 
methods ;" 2 or we can seize by an interior 
integral insight the rich concrete meaning 
and significance of the unanalyzed whole 
of consciousness, as it lives and moves in 
us. 

Psychology, like all sciences, proceeds 
by analysis and limitation. It breaks up 
the integral whole of inner experience. 
It strips away all mystery, all that is 
private and unique, and it selects for 
exact description the permanent and re- 
peatable aspects, and ends with a con- 
sciousness which consists of "mind-states," 
or describable "contents." Everything 
that will not reduce to this scientific 
"form" is ousted from the lists as negli- 
gible. All independent variables, all as- 
pects of "meaning," all will-attitudes, the 

1 Leuba's Psychology of Religion, p. 212. 

2 Ibid., p. 277. 



Ch. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 169 

unique feature of personal ideals, the 
integral consciousness of self-identity, the 
inherent tendency to transcend the 
"given" — all these features are either 
ignored or explained in terms of sub- 
stitutes. Psychology confines itself, and 
must confine itself, to an empirical and 
describable order of facts. It could no 
more discover a transcendent world-order 
than could geology or astronomy. Its 
field is phenomena and the "man" it 
reports upon is "a naturalistic man," as 
completely describable as the sunset cloud 
or the botanist'sJflower. 

What I insist upon, however, is that 
this " described, naturalistic man" is not 
a real existing, living, acting man possessed 
of interior experience. He is a constructed 
man. No addition of described "mind- 
states," no summation of "mind-contents" 
would ever give consciousness in its inner 
living wholeness. The reality whose pres- 
ence makes all the difference may be 
named "fringe," or "connecting prin- 
ciple," or "synthetic unity" or anything 



170 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. VI 

you please — "but oh! the difference to 
me!" The "psychic elements" of the 
psychologist are never really parts. Every 
psychical state is in reality what it is be- 
cause it belongs to a person, is flooded with 
unique life, and is imbedded in a peculiar 
whole of personality. Forever psychology 
by its method of analysis misses, and must 
miss, the central core of the reality. It 
can analyze, reduce, and describe the ab- 
stract, universal, and repeatable aspects, 
but it cannot catch the thing itself any 
more than a cinematograph can. 

Here in the inner life, if anywhere, we 
are justified in seizing and valuing the 
unified and undifferentiated whole of ex- 
perience in its central meaning. If this 
primary experience of integral wholeness 
and unity of self be treated as an illusion, 
to what other pillar and ground of truth 
can we fasten ? The object of beauty 
always reveals to us something which 
must be comprehended as a totality 
greater than the sum of its parts. The 
thing of beauty takes us beyond the range 



Ch. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 171 

of the method of description. So, too, in 
the case of our richest, most intense, and 
unified moments of inner consciousness, 
we cannot get an adequate account by the 
method of analysis. We must supplement 
science by the best testimony we can get 
of the worth and meaning and implica- 
tions of interior insight. We must get, 
where possible, appreciative accounts of the 
undifferentiated and unreduced experience 
and then we can raise the question as to 
what is rationally involved in such per- 
sonal experiences. 

As mystical experience supplies us with 
moments of the highest integral unity, the 
richest wholes of consciousness, I shall 
deal mainly with that type, and I shall 
endeavor to see whether it gives any proof 
of a trans-subjective reality. There can 
be no doubt that this type of experience 
brings the recipient spiritual holidays from 
strain and stress, that it gives life an 
optimistic tone, and leaves behind a fresh 
supply of energy to live by, but can it 
carry us any farther ? Does it supply us 



172 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. VI 

with a ladder or a bridge by which we can 
get "yonder" ? 

Josiah Royce in The World and the 
Individual says that the mystic "gets 
his reality not by thinking, but by con- 
sulting the data of experience. He is 
trying very skillfully to be a pure empiri- 
cist." " Indeed," he adds, " I should main- 
tain that the mystics are the only 
thoroughgoing empiricists in the history 
of philosophy." 1 "Finite as we are," 
Royce says elsewhere in the same book, 
"lost though we may seem to be in the 
woods or in the wide air's wilderness, in 
the world of time and chance, we have 
still, like the strayed animals or like the 
migrating birds, our homing instinct." 2 

Now the mystics in all ages have in- 
sisted that, whether the process be named 
"instinct," or "intuition," or "inner 
sense," or "uprushes," the spirit of man 
is capable of immediate experience of God. 
There is something in man, "a soul- 

1 The World and the Individual, Vol. I, p. 81. 

2 Ibid., p. 181. 



Ch. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 173 

center" or "an apex of soul," which di- 
rectly apprehends God. It is an immense 
claim, but those who have the experience 
are as sure that they have found a wider 
world of life as is the person who thrills 
with the appreciation of beauty. 

Cases of the experience are so well 
known to us all to-day that I shall quote 
only a very few accounts. It looks to me 
as though some of this direct and imme- 
diate experience underlay the entire fabric 
of St. Paul's transforming and dynamic re- 
ligious life. "It pleased God to reveal 
His Son in me." "It is no longer I that 
live but Christ liveth in me." "God 
sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our 
hearts, crying Abba, Father." "God who 
commanded the light to shine out of dark- 
ness hath shined in our hearts." The entire 
autobiographical story, wherever it comes 
into light, lets us see a man who is able to 
face mmense tasks and to die daily because 
he feels in some real way that his life has 
become "a habitation of God through the 
Spirit" and that he is being "filled to all 



174 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. VI 

fullness with God." St. Augustine in the 
same way makes the reader of the Confes- 
sions feel that the most wonderful thing 
about this strange African who was for a 
thousand years to be the Atlas, on whose 
shoulders the Church rested, was his ex- 
perience of God. He is speaking out of 
experience when he says, "My God is the 
Life of my life." "Thou, O God, hast 
made us for Thyself and our hearts are 
restless until they rest in Thee." "I 
tremble and I burn; I tremble feeling 
that I am unlike Him; I burn feeling 
that I am like Him." "I heard God as 
the heart heareth." "We climbed in 
inner thought and speech, and in wonder 
of Thy works, until we reached our own 
minds and passed beyond them and 
touched That which is not made but is 
now as it ever shall be, or rather in It is 
neither 'hath been' nor 'shall be' but only 
'is' — just for an instant touched It and 
in one trembling glance arrived at That 
which is." 

Jacob Boehme's testimony is very 



Ch. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 175 

familiar, but it is such a good interior 
account that I must repeat it. 

"While I was in affliction and trouble, I elevated 
my spirit, and earnestly raised it up unto God, as 
with a great stress and onset, lifting up my whole 
heart and mind and will and resolution to wrestle 
with the love and mercy of God and not to give 
over unless He blessed me — then the Spirit did 
break through. When in my resolved zeal I made 
such an assault, storm, and onset upon God, as if 
I had more reserves of virtue and power ready, 
with a resolution to hazard my life upon it, sud- 
denly my spirit did break through the Gate, not 
without the assistance of the Holy Spirit, and I 
reached to the innermost Birth of the Deity, and 
there I was embraced with love as a bridegroom 
embraces his bride. My triumphing can be com- 
pared to nothing but the experience in which life 
is generated in the midst of death or like the resur- 
rection from the dead. In this Light my spirit 
suddenly saw through all, and in all created things, 
even in herbs and grass, I knew God — who He is, 
how He is, and what His will is." * 

Very impressive are the less well-known 

words of Isaac Penington : "This is He, 

this is He : There is no other. This is 

1 The Aurora, Chap. XIX, pp. 10-13. 



176 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. VI 

He whom I have waited for and sought 
after from my childhood. I have met 
with my God; I have met with my 
Savior. I have felt the healings drop 
into my soul from under His wings." * 

Edward Carpenter has given many 
accounts of the transforming experience 
when he felt himself united in a living 
junction with the infinite " including Self." 
"The prince of love," he says, "touched 
the walls of my hut with his finger from 
within, and passing through like a great 
fire delivered me with unspeakable deliver- 
ance." 2 It brought him, as he himself 
says, "an absolute freedom from mortality 
accompanied by an indescribable calm and 
joy." 3 A nameless writer in the " Atlantic 
Monthly" for May, 1916, has given a re- 
markable description of an experience 
which is called "Twenty Minutes of 
Reality." " I only remember," the writer 
says, "finding myself in the very midst 
of those wonderful moments, beholding 

1 Isaac Penington, Works, Vol. I, p. xxxvii. 

2 Towards Democracy, p. 190. 

3 Ibid., p. 513. 



Ch. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 177 

life for the first time in all its young in- 
toxication of loveliness in its unspeakable 
joy, beauty, and importance. I cannot 
say what the mysterious change was — I 
saw no new thing, but I saw all the usual 
things in a miraculous new light — in 
what I believe is their true light. . . . 
Once out of all the gray days of my life I 
have looked into the heart of reality; I 
have witnessed the truth; I have seen 
life as it really is — ravishingly, ecstati- 
cally, madly beautiful, and filled to over- 
flowing with a wild joy and a value un- 
speakable." 

Finally, I shall give a modern Russian 
writer's appreciative report of a typical 
mystical experience : 

"There are seconds when you suddenly feel the 
presence of the eternal harmony perfectly attained. 
It's something not earthly — I don't mean in the 
sense that it's heavenly — but in that sense that 
man cannot endure it in his earthly aspect. He 
must be physically changed or die. This feeling is 
clear and unmistakable; it's as though you appre- 
hend all nature and suddenly say, 'Yes, that's 
right.' God, when He created the world, said at 



178 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. VI 

the end of each day of creation, 'Yes, it's right, 
it's good.' It . . . it's not being deeply moved, 
but simply joy. You don't forgive anything be- 
cause there is no more need of forgiveness. It's 
not that you love — oh, there's something in it 
higher than love — what's most awful is that it's 
terribly clear and such joy. In those five seconds 
I live through a lifetime, and I'd give my whole life 
for them, because they are worth it." *• 

It should always be noted that the 
number of persons who are subject to 
mystical experiences — that is to say, 
persons who feel themselves brought into 
contact with an environing Presence and 
supplied with new energy to live by — is 
much larger than we usually suppose. 
We know only the mystics who were 
dowered with a literary gift and who could 
tell in impressive language what had come 
to them, but of the multitude of those who 
have felt and seen and who yet were un- 
able to tell in words about their experience, 
of these we are ignorant. An undeveloped 
and uncultivated form of mystical con- 

1 Dostoievsky's The Possessed, 



Ch. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 179 

sciousness is present, I think, in most 
religious souls, and whenever it is unusually 
awake and vivid the whole inner and outer 
life is intensified by such experiences, even 
though there may be little that can be 
put into explicit account in language. 
There are multitudes of men and women 
now living, often in out-of-the-way places, 
in remote hamlets or on isolated farms, 
who are the salt of the earth and the light 
of the world in their communities, because 
they have had vital experiences that re- 
vealed to them realities which their neigh- 
bors missed and that supplied them with 
energy to live by which the mere "church- 
goers" failed to find. 

I am more and more convinced, as I 
pursue my studies on the meaning and 
value of mysticism, with the conviction 
that religion, i.e. religion when it is real, 
alive, vital, and transforming, is essen- 
tially and at bottom a mystical act, a 
direct response to an inner world of 
spiritual reality, an implicit relationship 
between the finite and infinite, between 



180 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. VI 

the part and the whole. The French 
philosopher, Emile Boutroux, has finely 
called this junction of finite and infinite 
in us, by which these mystical experiences 
are made possible, "the Beyond that is 
within" — " the Beyond," as he says, 
"with which man comes in touch on the 
inner side of his nature." 

Whenever we go back to the funda- 
mental mystical experience, to the soul's 
first-hand testimony, we come upon a 
conviction that the human spirit trans- 
cends itself and is environed by a spiritual 
world with which it holds commerce and 
vital relationship. The constructive mys- 
tics, not only of the Christian communions 
but also those of other religions, have ex- 
plored higher levels of life than those on 
which men usually live, and they have 
given impressive demonstration through 
the heightened dynamic quality of their 
lives and service that they have been 
drawing upon and utilizing reservoirs of 
vital energy. They have revealed a pecul- 
iar aptitude for correspondence with the 



Ch. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 181 

Beyond that is within, and they have ex- 
hibited a genius for living by their inner 
conviction of God, "of practicing God," 
as Jeremy Taylor called it. 

But are we justified in making such 
large affirmations ? Is there anything in 
the nature of mystical experience that 
warrants us in taking the leap from inner 
vision to existential reality ? Can we 
legitimately get from a finite, subjective 
feeling to an objective and infinite God ? 
The answer is of course obvious. There 
is no way to get a bridge from finite to 
infinite, from subject to object, from idea 
to that which the idea means , from human 
to divine, from mere man to God, if they 
are isolated, sundered, disparate entities 
to start with. No mere finite experience 
of a mere finite thing can be anything but 
finite, and no juggling can get out of the 
experience what is not in it. If we mean 
by "empirical" that which is "given" 
as explicit sense-content of consciousness, 
then the only empirical argument that 
could be would be the statement that we 



1 82 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. VI 

experience what we experience. We should 
not get beyond the consciousness of inter- 
jection — "lo !" "voila !" 

In this sense of the term, of course no- 
body ever did or ever could "experience 
God." We are shut up entirely to a 
stream of inner states, a seriatim conscious- 
ness, "a shower of shot," which can give 
us no knowledge at all, either, in Berkeley's 
words, of "the choir of heaven" or of 
"the furniture of earth" or of "the 
mighty frame of the world," or in fact, 
of any permanent self within us. 

Used in the narrow Humian sense there 
are no "empirical arguments" for the 
existence of God, but the misery of it is 
there are no arguments for anything else 
either ! We must therefore widen out the 
meaning of the term "empirical" and 
include in it not only the actual "con- 
tent" of experience, but all that is involved 
and implicated in experience. We cannot 
talk about any kind of reality until we 
interpret experience through its rational 
implications. Nobody ever perceives "a 



Ch. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 183 

black beetle" and knows it as "a black 
beetle" without transcending "pure em- 
piricism," i.e. without using categories 
which are not a product of experience. 
All experience which has any knowledge- 
import, or value, possesses within itself 
self-transcendence, that is to say, it appre- 
hends or takes by storm some sort of ex- 
ternal or objective reality. Nobody is 
ever disturbed by the fallacy of subjec- 
tivism until he has become debauched by 
metaphysics. The fallacy of subjectivism 
is always the product of the abstract 
intellect, i.e. the intellect which divides 
experience, and takes an abstract part for a 
whole. 

It is further true that all knowledge- 
experience possesses within itself finite- 
transcendence, i.e. it contains in itself a 
principle of infinity and could become ab- 
solutely rationalized only in an infinite 
whole of reality with which the experience 
is in organic unity. I agree fully with 
Professor Hocking that "it is doubtful 
whether there are any finite ideas at all." 



184 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. VI 

The consciousness of the finite has work- 
ing in it the reality of the whole. The 
finite can never be considered as self- 
existent; it can never be real. There is 
forever present in the very heart and na- 
ture of consciousness a trope, a nisus, a 
straining of the fragment to link itself up 
with the self-complete whole, and every 
flash of knowledge and every pursuit of 
the good reveals that trend. Something 
of the other is always in the me — and how- 
ever finite I may be I am always beyond 
myself, and am conjunct with "the pulse 
beat of the whole system." Either we 
must give up talking of knowledge or we 
must affirm that knowledge involves a 
self-complete and self-explanatory reality 
with which our consciousness has connec- 
tion. We cannot think finite and con- 
tingent things, or aim at goodness however 
fragmentary, without rational appeal to 
something infinite and necessary. Hu- 
man experience cannot be rationally con- 
ceived except as a fragment of a vastly 
more inclusive experience, always implied 



Ch. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 185 

within the finite spirit, unifying and bind- 
ing together into one whole all that is 
absolutely real and true. Whether we are 
dealing with the so-called mystical experi- 
ence or any other kind of experience we are 
bound to postulate, or take for granted, 
whatever is rationally implicated in the 
very nature of the experience on our hands. 
No type of consciousness carries the 
implication of self-transcendence, or finite- 
transcendence, more coercively than does 
genuine mystical experience. The central 
aspect of it is the fusion of the self into a 
larger undifferentiated whole. It is thus 
much more the type of aesthetic experience 
than it is the type of knowledge-experience. 
In both types — the aesthetic and the 
mystical — consciousness is fused into 
union with its object, that is to say, the 
usual dualistic character of consciousness 
is transcended, though of course not 
wholly obliterated. A new level of con- 
sciousness is gained in which the division 
of self and other is minimal. But it is 
by no means, in either case, an empty or a 



1 86 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. VI 

negative state. The impression which so 
many mystics have given of negation or 
passivity springs, as Von Hiigel declares, 
from an unusually large amount of actu- 
alized energy, an energy which is now 
penetrating and finding expression by 
every pore and fiber of the soul. The 
whole moral and spiritual creature ex- 
pands and rests, yes : but this very rest is 
produced by action "unperceived because 
so fleet," "so near, so all fulfilling; or 
rather by a tissue of single acts, mental, 
emotional, volitional, so finely interwoven, 
so exceptionally stimulative and expressive 
of the soul's deepest aspirations, that these 
acts are not perceived as single acts, in- 
deed that their very collective presence is 
apt to remain unnoticed by the soul it- 
self." * Wordsworth's account passes al- 
most unconsciously from appreciation of 
beauty into joyous apprehension of God 
and it is a wonderful self-revelation of 
fused consciousness which is positively 
affirmative. 

1 The Mystical Element, Vol. II, p. 132. 



Ch. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 187 

"Sensation, soul and form 
All melted into him ; they swallowed up 
His animal being; in them did he live, 
And by them did he live ; they were his life. 
In such access of mind, in such high hours 
Of visitation from the living God, 
Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired. 
No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request; 
Rapt into still communion that transcends 
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise, 
His mind was a thanksgiving to the power 
That made him ; it was blessedness and love." 

Tennyson has given many accounts both 
in prose and poetry of similar affirma- 
tion experiences, sometimes initiated from 
within and sometimes from without. This 
account from the Memoirs is a good speci- 
men : "I have frequently had a kind of 
waking trance — this for the lack of a 
better word — quite up from my boyhood, 
when I have been all alone. This has 
come upon me through repeating my own 
name to myself silently, till all at once, 
as it were out of the intensity of the con- 
sciousness of individuality, individuality 
itself seemed to dissolve and fade away 



1 88 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. VI 

into boundless being, and this not a con- 
fused state but the clearest, the surest of 
the surest, utterly beyond words — where 
death was almost laughable impossibility 
— the loss of personality (if so it were) 
seeming no extinction, but the only true 
life." 

Like the aesthetic experience, again, the 
mystical experience brings an extraordi- 
nary integration, or unifying, of the self, a 
flooding of the entire being with joy and 
an expansion which, as in the case of the 
highest aesthetic experiences, takes the 
soul out into a world which " never was 
on sea or land," and which, nevertheless, for 
the moment seems the only world. 

Balfour has finely pointed out in his 
Theism and Humanism, that this expan- 
sion and joy and infinite aspect which 
are inherent in the aesthetic values can- 
not be rationally explained except on 
the supposition that these values are in 
part dependent upon a spiritual concep- 
tion of the world — the experience must 
have a pedigree adequate to account for 



Ch. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 189 

its greatness. We cannot begin with an 
experience which gives an absolutely new 
dimension of life and a new world of joy, 
and then end in our explanation with a 
phenomenal play of cosmic atoms — "full 
of sound and fury, signifying nothing." 

The same thing is true with our mystical 
experience. We cannot, of course, say off- 
hand that here we experience God as one 
experiences an object of sense, or that we 
have at last found an infallible and in- 
dubitable evidence of the infinite God. 
My only contention is that here is a form 
of experience which implies one of two 
things. Either there is far greater depth 
and complexity to the inmost nature of 
personal self-consciousness than we usually 
take into account, that is, we ourselves are 
bottomless and inwardly exhaustless in 
range and scope ; or the fragmentary 
thing we call our self is continuous in- 
wardly with a wider spiritual world with 
which we have some sort of contact- 
relationship and from which vitalizing 
energy comes in to us. It is too soon to 



190 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. VI 

decide between these two alternatives. 
We are only at the very beginning of the 
study of the submerged life within our- 
selves, and we must know vastly more 
about it than we now know before we can 
draw the boundaries of the soul or declare 
with certainty what comes from its own 
deeps and what comes from beyond its 
farthest margins. The studies of Bergson 
and still more emphatically the studies of 
Dr. William McDougall in Body and 
Mind show very conclusively that the con- 
sciousness of meaning, the higher forms of 
memory, the richer and more subtle emo- 
tional experiences and the more significant 
facts of attention, conation, and will cannot 
be explained in terms of cerebral activities 
or by any kind of mechanical causation. 1 

To arrive at any explanation of the 
most central activities of personal con- 
sciousness we must assume that conscious- 
ness is a reality existing in its own sphere 
and vastly transcending the physical mech- 
anism which it uses. If this is a fact 

1 This point has been discussed in the previous chapter. 



Ch. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 191 

— and McDougall's argument is the work 
of one of the most careful and scientifically 
trained of modern psychologists — then 
there is no reason why what we call the 
"soul" might not on occasions receive 
incomes of life and spiritual energy from 
the infinite source of consciousness. I 
can only say that the mystic in his highest 
moments feels himself to be and believes 
himself to be in vital fellowship with 
Another than himself — and what is more, 
some power to live by does come in from 
somewhere. Mystical experiences in a 
large number of instances not only per- 
manently integrate the self but also bring 
an added and heightened moral and spirit- 
ual quality and a greatly increased dy- 
namic effect. 

We are still in the stage of mystery in 
dealing with the causes of variations and 
mutations in the biological order. Some- 
thing surprising and novel, something 
that was not there before, something in- 
calculable and unpredictable suddenly ap- 
pears and a little living creature arrives 



192 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. VI 

equipped with a trait which no ancestor 
had and by means of which he can endure 
better, can see farther or run faster, can 
survive longer, and is, in fact, on a higher 
life-level. We do not know how the little 
midget did it. But some elan vital may 
have burst in from an invisible and in- 
tangible environment, more real even than 
the environment we see. The universe, as 
Professor Shaler once said, seems to be "a 
realm of unending and infinitely varied 
originations." So, too, these flushes of 
splendor which break through the "Soul's 
east window of divine surprise" may come 
from a perfectly real spiritual environment 
without which a finite spirit could not be at 
all or live at all. I do not know. Our frag- 
mentary experiences cannot enable us to 
furnish irrefragible proof. It only looks as 
though God were within reach and as though 
at moments we were at home with Him. 

Gilbert Murray's cautious conclusion in 
his fine essay on Stoicism is a good word 
with which to close this chapter. 

"We seem to find," he says, "not only 



Ch. VI] EXPERIENCE OF GOD 193 

in all religions, but in practically all 
philosophies, some belief that man is not 
quite alone in the universe, but is met in 
his endeavours towards the good by some 
external help or sympathy. ... It is 
important to realize that the so-called 
belief is not really an intellectual judgment 
so much as a craving of the whole nature 
[in us]. ... It is only of very late years 
that psychologists have begun to realize the 
enormous dominion of those forces in man 
of which he is normally unconscious. We 
cannot escape as easily as these brave men 
[the Stoics] dreamed from the grip of the 
blind powers beneath the threshold. In- 
deed, as I see philosophy after philosophy 
falling into this unproven belief in the 
Friend behind phenomena, as I find that I 
myself cannot, except for a moment and by 
an effort, refrain from making the same as- 
sumption, it seems to me that perhaps 
here, too, we are under the spell of a very 
old ineradicable instinct. We are gre- 
garious animals ; our ancestors have been 
such for countless ages. We cannot help 



194 THE INNER LIFE [Ch. VI 

looking out on the world as gregarious 
animals do ; we see it in terms of humanity 
and of fellowship. Students of animals 
under domestication have shown us how 
the habits of a gregarious creature, taken 
away from his kind, are shaped in a 
thousand details by reference to the lost 
pack which is no longer there — the pack 
which a dog tries to smell his way back to 
all the time he is out walking, the pack he 
calls to for help when danger threatens. 
It is a strange and touching thing, this 
eternal hunger of the gregarious animal 
for the herd of friends who are not there. 
And it may be, it may very possibly be, 
that, in the matter of this Friend behind 
phenomena, our own yearning and our own 
almost ineradicable instinctive conviction, 
since they are certainly not founded on 
either reason or observation, are in origin 
the groping of a lonely-souled gregarious 
animal to find its herd or its herd-leader 
in the great spaces between the stars. 

"At any rate, it is a belief very difficult 
to get rid of." 

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meaning. The story of the Quaker invasion of the Colonies in the New 
World has often been told in fragmentary fashion, but no adequate study of 
the entire Quaker movement in Colonial times has yet been made from 
original sources, free from partisan or sectarian prejudice and with due 
historical perspective. The accounts written from the Quaker point of view 
do not furnish a critical investigation of Quakerism and its work in the New 
World ; while those written from the anti-Quaker point of view are for the 
most part one-sided and colored by prejudice, and are obviously lacking in 
penetration into the inner meaning of the type of religion which they under- 
take to present. By avoiding these extremes and by furnishing a critical 
investigation of Quakerism both in its outer forms and its inner spirit, Pro- 
fessor Jones has produced an excellent piece of work, done in an impartial 
and historical spirit and not too brief to admit of details. The account is 
an able and clear treatment of the religious principles of Quakerism, replete 
with first-hand knowledge and with concrete details, and thus it presents a 
truly historical picture of this great movement which bore no small part in 
the early political and religious life of this country. 

This volume is divided into five books. Book I. deals with the Quakers 
in New England; Book II. with Quakerism in the Colony of New York; 
Book III. with the Quakers in the Southern Colonies ; Book IV. deals with 
the early Quakers in New Jersey, and Book V. with the Quakers in 
Pennsylvania. 

The work thus admirably assists the man of to-day to visualize the life 
history of the Quaker movement on this continent. 



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Studies in Mystical Religion 

By RUFUS M. JONES, M.A., D.Litt. 

Professor of Philosophy, Haverford College, U.S.A. 

Cloth, gilt top, 518 pages, $3.00 

PRESS NOTICES 

" The book is written with clearness and quiet dignity. It is animated through- 
out by breadth of fine and kindly sympathies, and by a sense of the character of 
religion as a light and a power that from within control all the social fulfilments of 
our nature." — Philosophical Review. 

11 Such a work as this is not only a contribution of great timeliness in these days 
when the thoughts of scholarly men are turning perhaps as not before for centuries 
toward religion, but will go far to give mysticism, of which perhaps Quakerism is the 
best American illustration, a standing even at the bar of science." 

— American Journal of Religious Psychology. 

" It is a book of wide and conscientious research, solid and steady structure and 
noble aim. The style is clear and definite, free of any attempt to dazzle or confuse. 
Those who have come to feel that the seat of authority in religion lies in the first-hand 
experience of the soul will turn eagerly to it, opening up as it does so many channels 
of the spiritual life of the past." — North American Review. 

" It is a careful study of subjective religion, from the New Testament down to 
modern times. A vast field is covered and covered completely. The writer has made 
excellent use of his materials and given a sympathetic study of religion on its subjec- 
tive and personal side." — New York Times. 

" It shows abundant evidence of conscientious research and a careful study of 
sources either not easily accessible or generally passed over by the student. Suf- 
ficient attention has been given to the analytical investigation of the subject." 

— The Churchman. 

" His study is distinguished by moderation and justice, high intent and reverent 
spirit. It has a peculiar significance for us, because, in a generation when many are 
following will-o'-the-wisps and garish lights, it studies classic and enduring experi- 
ences; and because it reminds us of a mystic strain which is our inheritance, and, I 
hope, our genius, and which in time will have its own poets, philosophers, and 
prophets. If this comes not even in some measure in our own day, it will still be 
splendid to have prepared the way and made straight the path by some such notable 
achievement as this study in mystical religion by Professor Jones." 

— Boston Transcript. 



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Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



The Gospel of Good Will as Revealed in 
Contemporary Christian Scriptures 

The Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale University for 1916 

By WILLIAM DeWITT HYDE 

President of Bowdoin College and Author of " The Five Great 
Philosophies of Life," etc. 

Cloth, i2tno, $1.50 

This book goes straight to the heart of the Gospel to be 
preached and practiced — the Gospel that Christ expects men 
to be great enough to make the good of all affected by their 
action, the object of their wills, as it is the object of the will of 
God. " The Christian," President Hyde writes, " is not a ' plas- 
ter saint' who holds { safety first' to be the supreme spiritual 
grace, but the man who earns and spends his money, controls 
his appetites, chooses peace or war and does whatever his hand 
finds to do with an eye single to the greatest good of all con- 
cerned. Sin is falling short of this high heroic aim. ... To 
the Christian every secular vocation is a chance to express Good 
Will and sacrifice is the price he gladly pays for the privilege. 
. . . Christian character and Christian virtues will come not by 
direct cultivation but as by-products of Good Will expressed in 
daily life. The church is a precious and sacred instrument for 
transforming men and institutions into sons and servants of 
Good Will." These extracts indicate in a measure the trend of 
President Hyde's theme which he has treated fully and in a 
practical way that will appeal to all thinkers. 

" A lucid style, a sympathetic treatment of present tendencies, 
and a high ideal of Christian service make this a fascinating 
volume." — Independent. 



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Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



Three Religious Leaders of Oxford and 
Their Movements : John Wycliffe, John 
Wesley, John Henry Newman 

By S. PARKES CADMAN 

Cloth, 8vo, $2.50 

This book deals with three great Englishmen, great 
Christians, great Churchmen, and loyal sons of Ox- 
ford, who, in Dr. Cadman's opinion, are the foremost 
leaders in religious life and activity that university 
has yet given to the world. " Many prophets, priests 
and kings," writes Dr. Cadman, "have been nour- 
ished within her borders, but none who in significance 
and contribution to the general welfare compare with 
Wycliffe, the real originator of European Protestant- 
ism; Wesley, the Anglican priest who became the 
founder of Methodism and one of the makers of 
modern England and of English-speaking nations; 
Newman, the spiritual genius of his century, who re- 
interpreted Catholicism, both Anglican and Roman." 

" It is a great book. The theme is noble and the 
execution is masterly — It is the serious book of the 
year. Every minister must have it on his table. It 
deserves a proud place in the library of every Chris- 
tian layman." — The Brooklyn Eagle. 



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Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



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